Octavia led the way further into the tunnel, but something about her movement struck me as hesitant. "Everything is normal down there, just so you know."

I followed behind her with a pep in my step. "All the better. I think it's time I learned what 'normal' means to you. Even if these are the same rocks and tunnels that you've been looking at for years, this is all new to me."

She paused for a moment. "This seems really important to you."

"It is," said. "Thank you for indulging me."

Octavia led the way to the lip which overlooked the chasm, and I could make out the faint outline of what I presumed were the other tunnel entrances. She was about to hoist me off the ground, but I stopped her. "Hold on," I said. "Can I try climbing myself?"

"It's okay," said Octavia. "It's easier for me to carry you."

"You might not always be here to carry me."

"But I'm here to carry you right now," said Octavia. "We can bother with that some other time."

"Can we really, though?" I asked. "Because the way I'm thinking, the situation in which I find myself needing to navigate between your tunnels without you here to assist me would probably be the sort of desperate or urgent situation where I wouldn't have the time for testing or experimentation." I looked down. "Plus, I'd like to make a firm determination as to whether I can do this. Better for me to learn that lesson while you're around to catch me if I fall."

"If you fall, my webs will catch you," said Octavia.

"Yes, and a fat lot of good that will do me if I have no one to fish me out of them. Do you remember when we first met? I was caught in your web, totally helpless. Now seems like the perfect time for me to experiment: if I fall, then you can swing down and retrieve me from the web. It's safer this way, yes?"

"Fine," said Octavia. She didn't come across impatient so much as bewildered by my request.

I considered the best way to traverse the wall. It was similar enough to the texture of the side of the plateau that I had gotten used to climbing, and I quickly realized it was even easier for me to start climbing down, in contrast to the plateau that I'd previously considered my home. While the plateau always left me with a few terrifying moments of uncertainty as I had to swing myself off of it to descent from its surface, in the cave, I could begin my climb downward by climbing upward: I latched onto the wall of the upper tunnel, inched myself up just enough to get clear of the tunnel floor, then traversed the cave wall laterally until I was clinging to the part of the wall that overhung the chasm. From there, it was simply a matter of climbing down or across the chasm to whichever tunnel I wanted to access.

"Which tunnel should I start with?" I asked. Rather than answer verbally, Octavia skittered across the wall ahead of me, leading the way to the tunnel directly below the one we occupied. Despite it being the closest tunnel in terms of absolute distance, it was the one I felt least familiar with, since the entrance was located under the lip of the upper tunnel, completely obscuring its presence from the upper tunnel.

As I climbed lower to follow Octavia, I saw that the tunnel's mouth was shorter than some of the others. It was tall enough that I could have stood in it, but it was short enough that, with my vertically-oriented climbing stance, I couldn't move laterally into it the same way that I had laterally moved out of the upper tunnel: my tail got in the way. Bearing that in mind, I descended lower on the cave wall until I rested under the tunnel entrance, then climbed my way up and pulled myself into it, the same way that I might pull myself onto the surface of the plateau when climbing from below. As I pulled myself up, Octavia was already waiting for me.

I blinked in the relative darkness, and was surprised by how well I could see: it was night, and the orientation of the tunnel meant that almost none of the moonlight from the upper cave entrance would be reflected down here, yet I could still easily make out Octavia's shape as she walked ahead of me. I was intensely aware that low light conditions were not the same as no light conditions, but moonlight could only do so much, especially as we traversed further and further into the tunnel.

"Careful as you go," said Octavia, and she dipped out of sight. I exercised the recommended amount of caution as I followed her, sliding down a short slope. As I landed behind Octavia, I could see that the tunnel was thick with Octavia's web, which seemed to sparkle with the same luminescence that the web in the upper tunnel sparked under the moonlight. How?

Octavia pointed past the web. "I have several layers of walls between here and where the ants hang out. Between each of the walls, I've covered the tunnel completely. Floor, walls, roof."

"Are you sure you don't mean ceiling, not roof?"

"Huh?" said Octavia. "They mean the same thing."

"A roof is what covers a structure from the outside," I said. "A ceiling is what forms the upper surface from the inside. You can stand on a roof; you can jump up and touch a ceiling. Roofers work outside, ceiling installers work indoors."

"What do you call the top of your mouth?" said Octavia.

"You mean the roof of the mouth?"

"Yes," said Octavia. "See? You wouldn't call it the 'ceiling' of your mouth. Things that are inside can still be called a 'roof.' I went on a tour of a cave once. The guide called it the 'roof' of the cave. When you're in a cave, ceiling and roof mean the same thing."

"Okay," I said. "I'll defer to that guide's expertise."

"I'm glad we settled that," said Octavia, not sounding glad at all. She raised a leg as about to point, then stopped. "What was the point of that?" she asked.

"What, you mean my line of questioning about roofs and ceilings?" I asked.

"Why do you feel the need to correct me?"

"I wasn't correcting you," I said. "I phrased it as a question."

"You're correcting me now," said Octavia.

"Yes," I said. "But when I asked you about whether you meant the ceiling of the cave, and not the roof, I phrased it as a question. I wasn't telling you that you were wrong. I wanted to know if that was the proper term or not. And now that you've answered my question, I'm happy to accept that answer without any further disagreement."

"But why does it matter?" said Octavia. "You already knew what I meant.

I shrugged. "I like to know things. I'm sorry if I was wasting our time. I guess I just tend to be overly curious about things. I'll try to limit my questions to what's actually useful."

Octavia sighed. "I don't mind all the questions, it's just…you're like a child. No offense."

"None taken. I am a newborn, after all." I grinned.

"Well, then little dragon," said Octavia, her tone more playful than biting, "as I was saying, past this web wall, I've covered the floor, wall, and roof of the cave with my webs. There are multiple layers for them to get through." She pointed. "The ants have plugged up their own end of the tunnel. Can you see the rocks from here?"

I looked, and was surprised to see that I could faintly make out the shape of a group of rocks that lay beyond Octavia's layers of webs.

Octavia narrated as she pointed. "They have their end of the tunnel plugged with stones, and they're packed too tight for me to get past, but they always leave a gap between the rocks that's barely big enough for an ant to slip through.."

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"So, a stalemate," I said. "You can't enter their end of the tunnel due to the rocks, and they can't enter your end due to the webs."

"Well, they can," said Octavia. "It's just not a very good idea for them to do it." She let out a series of rasps that sounded like a sinister chuckle.

I squinted, trying to better see the details of the rock formation that the ants had constructed, but Octavia's webs were too thick for me to make out the finer details. The webs themselves were distracting with the way they seemed to shimmer, despite us being deep into the tunnel, with no direct way for moonlight to enter. The shimmer was faint, but as I looked past the many tiers of webbed walls, it almost seemed as if the shimmering were more intense the further we got into the cave.

"Why do your webs sparkle like that?" I said. "Even down here. They seem to catch the light, when there's no light to catch."

"Oh," said Octavia. "It's probably the glowstone. You can see the light bleeding through the cracks in their rock formation."

"The what?"

"I think that the ants started using it as a building material," said Octavia. "Kind of wasteful if you ask me, considering how little time they spend down here, but I guess they must have run out of rocks and are just reaching for anything they can use to jam up the tunnel."

"I think I'm going to need you to explain 'glowstone' to me," I said.

"Glowstone," said Octavia. "You don't know what I'm talking about?"

"Again, I've been in this world for like, a week," I said. "And also, I spent all of my time above the surface before I met you. So when it comes to subterranean matters, you should just assume that I'm completely ignorant. If you haven't shown it to me, I don't know it exists."

"It's like a glowing rock," said Octavia. "Hence the name. It's kind of hard to see the glowstone from here; the ants seem to have buried it under smaller rocks. But there's some in the lower tunnels that's close enough for me to show you."

"Please do," I said.

"Like, right now?" she said.

"Yes!" I said. "Octavia, I'm sorry for wasting your time with that line of questioning earlier about whether the upper surface of a cave tunnel should be classified as a 'roof' or a 'ceiling.' You're right, that was an unnecessary distraction. But if there's an underground source of illumination, that seems like the kind of thing I should know about."

"Okay," she said, scuttling back toward the central chasm. "It's not much to look at, though."

I thought of telling her that, if it was the only source of illumination in the deeper tunnels, then it was the only thing to see – or at least, see by – but I kept the thought to myself.

As we neared the edge overlooking the central chasm, I briefly glanced over my shoulder at the tunnel we were leaving behind. As I looked forward and looked at all of the other nearly-identical cave entrances, it occurred to me that it might be useful to start putting mental labels on these tunnels — not only for the sake of keeping them straight in my own head, but for the sake of communicating with Octavia. However, given that I was apparently already testing the limits of her patience, now seemed like a poor time to try and get her to participate in developing a classification system, so for now, I decided to classify the tunnel we were on on as "sublevel 1," as it was just below the ground-level entrance, and this specific tunnel as "sublevel 1, south," since it ran parallel to the south-facing entrance.

According to that rough coordinate system, the cave which Octavia seemed to be leading me toward would be sublevel 3, east. After getting out of the low-roofed tunnel, I climbed after her without much difficulty, though I was considerably slower than she was. As soon as I entered the tunnel, she began scuttling ahead of me. This tunnel was more steeply sloped than the others, taking us further and further down toward the bottom — and as we reached the tunnel's innermost depths, I could see the faint glow of reflected light. As soon as I settled at the bottom of the tunnel, I realized how low the ceiling – or roof – was. To follow Octavia, I nearly had to flatten myself against the floor, and I felt the top of my head scraping against the rock roof, despite my best efforts.

Octavia, for her part, seemed to be adapting well to the height difference, with her legs simply taking on a more horizontal stance; despite the low clearance, the tunnel was plenty wide, more than enough to accommodate her. I followed Octavia, and she guided me forward, with the luminescence that lit the tunnel growing brighter with every step; as we advanced, the color seemed distinctly blue. I wasn't sure whether that was a trick that my eyes were playing on me, until my eyes finally rested on the source of the illumination, an azure stone, rough in shape, but approximately two inches across in each direction, with a surface that seemed just as rough in texture as the rock that surrounded it. It lacked the polish of a well-cut gemstone, but its glow was unmistakable.

I looked at Octavia. "Anything I should know about this? Is it dangerous to touch? Dangerous in any way? Prone to explosions?"

"No, nothing like that," said Octavia. "Unless it breaks. It makes a pretty big explosion if it does."

"That seems like a pretty big 'if!'"

"But it doesn't break," said Octavia. "It's glowstone. I've only seen it break once."

"The statement that you've seen it break once seems to contradict your claim that it doesn't break."

"Look," said Octavia. She tapped it several times with her claw, and I winced. "It's not going to break. It would take…well, a lot of force to crush it. I don't know if anything is harder than glowstone."

I studied the glowing rock. The fact that these things apparently exploded upon breaking seemed to be consistent with the light it was emitting: the continuous emission of light implied it was an energy source of some kind. Emit a little bit of energy continuously, and you get a glow. Crack it open, and you could potentially unleash all that energy at once. How much energy would be contained in a rock of this size?

"Do these things ever lose their glow?" I asked Octavia.

"Not that I've seen."

"So, at least…"

"What do you mean?" said Octavia.

"I'm asking you to narrow it down," I said. "The fact that you've never seen one burn out doesn't mean that they last forever. Maybe they last for fifty years, or a hundred years, I don't know. But we can at least narrow it down if, for example, you've seen a single glowstone that has glowed for five years."

"Yeah," she said. "I've seen glowstone that has kept its glow for at least…twenty years. More than that, even."

"More by how much?" I asked. "Closer to thirty, or forty?"

"I don't know," she said. "At a certain point, I stopped keeping track of years. Why does it matter if it was thirty, or forty, or a hundred years? If you knew that they lasted for a thousand years instead of a hundred, would it make any difference?"

"Yes, it would," I said. "When an object glows, it's emitting energy in radiant form. So whether a rock glows for a hundred years or a thousand is based on how much energy it contains, right? If you took a glowstone that had a thousand years worth of luster in it and cracked it open, it would create an explosion ten times as big as a glowstone with a hundred year lifespan. That could matter!" I wasn't even sure if the math worked out linearly like that — maybe glowstone emitted radiant light at different rates throughout its lifespan, maybe some of the energy they emitted as light was energy that they observed over time from geothermal sources rather than something that was part of their formation — but I didn't want to bog her down with the details.

"You're talking about glowstone exploding, as if that's something that's going to happen," said Octavia. "But it doesn't."

"Except for the one time when it did."

"That was during an earthquake," said Octavia.

"Earthquakes happen here?" I said.

"Very rarely," said Octavia. "I've only experienced one. It was probably more than a decade ago."

I got closer to the glowstone, awed not only by its cyan-tinged light, but by what that glowing implied. I tentatively tapped at it, but it didn't react to my touch — or if there was a reaction, it didn't manifest as a flicker or anything else visible.

Then, I felt a cramp in my leg, and realized that, in the extremely low-clearance cave tunnel, I was assuming a very awkward posture. "Alright," I said, "I think I've seen enough for now."

"Great," she said, leading me back to the part of the tunnel that emptied into the central cavern. As she reached it, she turned to me and said, "Can we do the thing now? Where you go to the surface and attack the ants from above?"

"Sure," I said.

The truth was that I wanted to keep exploring the lower tunnels and see more of what this cave had to offer. But Octavia had already been plenty generous in teaching me things today: we had begun the night with a lengthy discussion on our abilities and the ecology of the desert surface, she had indulged my desire to test my climbing abilities on the cave walls, and she had now shown me several of her tunnels. Octavia was right to want to focus on action: SP was the kind of resource that was 'use it or lose it,' and there would always be time tomorrow for more questions.

As I followed her to the cave entrance, I spoke up. "Thanks for answering all of my questions, Octavia," I said.

"You're welcome," she said.

"I know that sometimes, it might seem like I'm overthinking things. I know that certain things might not seem useful in the moment that I'm asking them. But you never know where a bit of knowledge will take you."

"I understand," said Octavia. "Even if I don't understand, I understand."

I nodded. Her meaning was clear, even if her statement was semantically odd. Octavia did understand my curiosity: she had, without prompting, suggested that I attack the ants from above then quickly return back so that I could observe their movement in the lower tunnel. From her point of view, that was the kind of thing that was worth observing first hand, and I couldn't disagree with her: she understood the value of knowledge in the abstract; our only disagreement was over which threads were worth exploring.

With that thought in mind, for the third time that night, I exited the cave, and headed toward the ant lair with something between curiosity and bloodlust. Time to see how they run.