The caterpillar and the wasp spiraled down together, away from the rooftop, falling toward the soil. Adon’s home terrain.

As if the battle had not already more or less ended in his favor, he added a bit of insult to injury by pulling his mandibles out of her body and positioning the Queen so as to shield himself from the brunt of their fall.

Their combined weight made it the hardest landing he had ever endured, though it still was not particularly forceful compared with what he had experienced in every lifetime he had lived as any larger species.

The Queen’s body made a quiet wet crunching noise as her abdomen smacked into the ground. Adon stepped back slightly and got a good look at her. Her lower half had almost dissolved from the combination of acid and impact with the earth. Her upper half was contorted with pain, her limbs twisted around her body as if she was hugging herself.

He shook his head, moved by pity. I can’t believe what I had to do today, he thought. Well, I’ll put you out of your misery. Then at least this nightmare will be over.

Adon opened his mandibles and placed them around the Queen’s slender neck, ready to decapitate her.

Please. Spare me. The Queen’s voice was faint in Adon’s mind, but he heard it clearly.

There was a part of him that wanted to weep with pity for her.

But another side of him had no tears to shed. She had done so much to deserve death. Yet he still felt a pang in his chest at the thought of killing her while she was begging to live.

I can’t spare you, he sent back, his tone almost pleading for understanding. You know that. You told me why yourself.

She was almost certainly dying anyway, and Adon had no way of saving her other than healing magic. But he was not about to burn himself out healing her. Not when he still had some injuries of his own to fix, and they were her doing.

Please. I can leave. Start a new life in another country. You will never see me again. I swear. She sounded sincere.

Frustrated, he sent, Where was that attitude when I was the one who wanted to leave the garden?

Things are different now, she replied in a humble tone. I have learned that you were mightier than me. It was a fact that I could learn in no other way besides fighting you. I have no reason to stay after suffering such a total defeat.

Adon wanted to believe her, despite all the pain she had inflicted on him. Despite the fact that she had threatened Goldie and Red. It took him a moment to understand why he felt such strong hesitance to kill her. It was not her desperate desire to survive, exactly. She had that in common with every other creature he had killed since he had arrived in this garden, barring the ants.

She thinks and feels in a complex way like me, he thought to himself. I’ve never killed another thinking, speaking life form. It’s different. She has a whole vision of her future. Plans. Hopes. Dreams. Is she truly so different from me? Then he shook his head, angry at himself for being soft toward someone who was so unambiguously his enemy.

Yes, she is different! She started this on purpose. She killed the voles just because they were in the way of getting to me. That whole little family… Their blood is on my hands, but mostly on hers. She’s a force for destruction. It’s true that she’s like me, but that’s a problem, not a reason to spare her. She’s already broken her word once. And humans hold a grudge better than most other species. She’ll never forget who did this to her. Unless her whole personality changes, I’ll never be free of her if I don’t kill her now.

He met the Queen’s gaze, and she seemed to see the resolve in Adon’s shiny compound eyes. Her whole body stiffened.

Adon closed his mandibles around her neck, just as a last thought transmitted from her mind to his.

I have already sent my children to—

Nothing.

Her head fell to the ground, and the air around Adon rang with the deafening silence that her last words had left behind.

What does that mean? he wondered, suddenly apprehensive for the safety of his friends again. What did she send her children to—

Suddenly the remaining three royal guard wasps were upon him, stabbing with their stingers, probing for weaknesses like the dents in his exoskeleton their powerful weapons had created before. They had somehow arrived just in time to fail at saving their Queen.

For a moment, Adon simply took the attacks.

Enough! His frustration burst out from him in a psychic wave that knocked the royal guard wasps from the air.

He looked around himself and at the royal guards twitching on the ground and realized he had harnessed mental magic again, without really thinking about it this time.

It’s so powerful, he thought. At least against these things. Somehow he couldn’t imagine an attack like this working on the Princess or someone like her.

Adon quickly moved from wasp to wasp, chomping their necks with his mandibles until the three lay dead and in pieces in a little circle around him.

He tilted his head up to the sky and verified in more detail what his simple eyes were already telling him: nothing wasp-shaped was flying in the air around him.

Thank the Goddess, he thought. It’s finally over.

His supply of Mana was almost completely exhausted. And he realized that he was almost completely burnt out too. Now that there were no more enemies to fight, he felt so tired. He wanted to collapse into a stupor.

Need to check on my friends first, he reminded himself.

Eat the Queen, demanded a voice in his head. Adon was taken off guard for a moment, only to realize the voice was his own. He was pursuing more than one train of thought at a time again, as he had during the fight. He was still tapping into mental magic.

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Adon broke the connection and felt a sudden, intense pain in his head. That pain broke his focus on maintaining Mana reinforcement around his body, and he noticed an immediate difference as energy rushed out of his exoskeleton. Some of it made its way back into his core. Some of it was simply lost in the air around him. His pool of Mana felt much-diminished.

He looked at the Queen’s body. For a moment, the command of his inner voice had felt strange, because it was telling him to consume the body of a fellow thinking life form. But the Queen was fundamentally just a dead body now. The body of a species above Adon’s in the natural hierarchy. Consuming her would make him stronger.

Can I really do this?

He shook his head again. He was dealing with the same issue as before. Just because she was sapient, he was treating her differently than all the other creatures that had attacked him in the past.

She was so evil. Why does this bother me so much?

He decided to eat her, before he could change his mind. Very quickly, since he needed to get back to his friends, in case they were in danger.

I’ll bring the royal guards’ bodies back with me, too. They would be the fuel Goldie and Red could use to evolve. That would make some sense out of this ugly, chaotic day.

He spun silk around the royal guard corpses and bound them around himself so that he could drag them. An experimental series of steps demonstrated that they were much lighter than the crow, despite being extraordinarily large for wasps. So they would be easy for him to drag.

Then Adon turned toward the Queen, and he began eating her from the head down.

Munch munch. Chomp chomp. Gobble gobble. Gulp.

He kept himself from drifting into a feeding trance as he ate this time, though it was a struggle. His mind constantly wanted to drift off and just let this process automatically handle itself, but Adon had the feeling that if he just allowed himself to drowse through the feeding process, he might pass out when he was done. He did not know how long his sleep-like state could last, but he was afraid of wasting time.

His friends could be in danger. As soon as he was done with this task, he needed to get back to them. He had to know if they were all right or if the Queen’s minions had inflicted some horrible fate on them during the fight. She had said she “already” sent her children to do something.

Until Adon confirmed their task was not murdering his friends, he could not rest easy.

He felt a sense of disgust when he thought of what he was doing, despite the fact that the Queen’s corpse tasted good, a sort of sweet nutty flavor. A few times, he almost stopped and had to force himself to keep going. Fortunately, the Queen was not very large.

The last bit of her body quickly disappeared into his maw, and then he was moving with somewhat renewed energy. His Mana was still shot, but he could feel that he was beginning to heal more quickly with the replenishment of his Biomass. He could sense his spines starting to grow back in, too, though he thought that might take a day or two, since he had expended all of them this time.

Adon looped the silk strings he had prepared around his body and began marching forward, dragging his bundles of food a couple of inches behind him.

He soon found himself passing the bodies of more wasps, ones he did not remember killing. Their general lack of visible injuries suggested to him that his first mental attack had indeed been fatal to some of his enemies.

There was a part of Adon that thought he might come back and get some more wasps to eat later, but he doubted it would be worth the trip. Maybe the bodies on the palace roof would still be there. Already some scavengers were picking at some of the more distant bodies on the ground. Just like that, the garden was ready to forget about the wasps and absorb them into its other species.

Adon was uncomfortably aware that the same thing could happen to him at any time. He thought of himself now as the garden’s fiercest predator. But the wasps had been a mightier force than him, in most respects. Certainly, they had left a far greater environmental footprint.

And now look at them.

It made Adon consider his place in this ecosystem again. Made him wonder what purpose had brought him here, other than a possible mishearing of what he said he wanted for his next life. Surely there was some broader plan at work.

It was hard to believe the plan was for him to stay in this savage place, where bug-eat-bug was the only law. But then where should he go? Would he have to go alone? Or would Goldie—and maybe Red, if he continued to live—go with him after their children could fend for themselves?

He thought he never wanted to kill or eat a sapient life form again, but he wondered if he would keep to that resolve. Surely the Queen had not been uniquely evil. His mind pondered the future for long minutes as he dragged his burden along the path. What would he do after he evolved? Would he be forced to fight more enemies like the Queen in the future? More immediately, were his friends all right? That question made him very uncomfortable, since it felt as if there was nothing he could do about it right now. Naturally, it ended up taking up a lot of headspace.

But Adon gradually relaxed and allowed his mind to drift from those thoughts. The garden was quiet now. Since he lacked the energy to run, he tried to forget his worries and enjoy the journey. He was far from Goldie’s web. There was still much to admire about the garden if he pushed aside the carnage he had just participated in and his fears for the future.

New flowers bloomed as older ones began to fade. He guessed the new flowers, in a variety of shades of bright yellow, purple, pink, and white, were winter flowers. The ones that were fading tended to bear the colors of autumn: red, orange, and mustard yellow.

The pleasure of seeing this was not merely aesthetic, but in some sense spiritual. Adon thought that he might experience the same renewal as the environment. His metamorphosis was coming. Like the garden, he was only at one stage of his cycle. An early stage.

There was still much to do. The human world beckoned. The sky beckoned. The world of magic. And he had his friends. Goldie’s children would be a source of joy. Perhaps Red would survive too, and see his offspring hatch and grow. The caterpillar knew that he would enjoy watching the spiders engage with their family. Even if none of them could speak from birth, or learn language, there would still be a sense of fulfillment in protecting them and watching them grow.

It felt as if there were a thousand roads yet for him to walk down.

I’ll enjoy it, he thought. Maybe, just maybe, that’s enough of an accomplishment to make this last life worthwhile. To have friends and enjoy their company. To die, not like the Queen, begging for life from a hated enemy, but surrounded by those who I loved and who loved me.

Adon’s stiff insect face could not smile, but he began to feel the warmth of a smile spread through his body as he thought of the future.

Adon passed the place where the Vendetta Ants had lived, and the thought of those ants reminded him again of how dangerous the garden could be. He found himself suddenly anxious once more to see Goldie’s web. Were his friends all right?

He calmed himself by thinking of his more distant, optimistic, calm vision of the future again. He would assume they were all right until proven otherwise, since he could do nothing about it if he was wrong.

What did the immediate future hold, assuming his friends were fine? Well, there was a cold breeze in the air that Adon noted mainly because it had intensified as the day wound down.

Once the Princess is back, he thought, I should consider asking her if she would take us inside the palace. Even though I want to go through my metamorphosis, and I think Goldie and I can survive the winter by evolving again, there’s no reason why we should endanger her eggs by keeping them outside as the temperature changes. I think Rosslyn would say yes. She wanted to help us however we could. I think I might be ready to talk to her father if she insists she wants that to happen first. It certainly could not be any harder than talking to the wasp queen.

Then Adon stepped past a big, leafy plant.

The image of Goldie’s web with its beautiful shining bits of golden thread appeared in the distance.

Adon saw his friends’ home—and he saw a handful of familiar shapes. Those buzzing hourglass figures he had hoped he was done with forever.

A handful of wasps darted back and forth through the air above the web. By the way they moved, he could tell they were already engaged in combat with the spiders.

His heart sank, and he began pushing his body forward faster, trying to make himself run.

No!