Octavia scuttled toward the central chasm. "Do you still want to come down? You missed the action, but you can still see what's left of the ants. They'll be good for a meal, too."

"Of course," I said. "Though…on the subject of pilfering the remains of defeated enemies, how about that hyena I killed before? The smaller one."

Octavia glanced toward the cave entrance. "Did you want me to go check?"

"Or I could check," I said.

"I think you should stay here while I check."

At 0 SP and less than half my HP, I wasn't in a position to disagree with her, so I waited patiently as she dipped out of the cave entrance.

She returned a few moments later. "Gone already," she said.

"I'm not surprised," I said. "Probably already devoured or dragged off by the other hyenas. I've seen them do it before. Well, not in the act, but my first day in this desert ended with a hyena corpse at the bottom of my plateau, and the following morning began with that corpse gone after the hyenas had spent considerable time circling it. Freaking cannibals." As soon as I uttered the word, I glanced nervously to Octavia. "Uh, not that I couldn't be friends with a cannibal, if I met one with the right disposition."

She looked at me with an expression that I couldn't quite make out, until she spoke and the tone of her voice conveyed obvious amusement. "Are you asking if I'm the type to eat my own kin?"

"I wasn't accusing you of anything," I said. "But spiders have been known to do such things, particularly female spiders. Not that I'd want to generalize."

"Would you think less of me if I were?"

"Not particularly," I said. "Maybe my thoughts on cannibalism would be different if I were talking to a fellow dragon. I suppose I am curious, on some level."

"I haven't eaten fellow spiders," said Octavia. "Though, maybe that's just due to the circumstances of the life I've lived. I'm not sure if I would, given the opportunity. But I think it would feel weird, eating a friend, or family. It would feel like a betrayal, don't you think?"

"I'm quite averse to the idea of being killed," I said. "But if I'm already dead, well, it matters a lot less what happens to my remains. Sometimes, you've gotta do what you gotta do. I suppose if I died, I'd prefer for my friends to inherit my possessions than my enemies. And 'the clump of cells that used to be my body' falls into that category. I wouldn't want them to get any pathogens I was carrying, which can be an issue with cannibalism, but in a world like this, you can't be too picky with what you eat."

"Hehe." Octavia chuckled. "I probably wouldn't survive very long as a spider if I was picky with what I ate. I mean, before I could digest fruit, I mostly ate bugs and things like that."

"Indeed. Can you imagine?" Then I considered the idea. "Hey…Octavia, is it…unpleasant?"

"Is what unpleasant?" she asked.

"Well…you're a spider."

"Yeah, I'm a spider. So what?"

"Well," I said. "You said that you don't find it gross to eat insects. What about all of the other things that go with being a spider? Having eight legs, having all those eyes…it must be a completely different existence. You can't even blink."

Octavia looked at me with those unblinking eyes. "I…I'm not even sure what you're asking. What about you? Is it unpleasant being a dragon?"

"No, not really," I said.

"I don't see how I'm any different from you," she said. "You have an inhuman body. You walk on four legs, and have a tail, and you have breath that smells like nasty cigarettes, but I don't hear you complaining about it."

"Does my breath really smell that bad?"

"When you're attacking enemies with it, yeah," she said. "It's fine normally. Or…at least, it's not unpleasant. Definitely noticeable, though. I mean, that's what happens when you eat meat, right? If any of it gets caught in your teeth, it starts to rot, and other creatures can pick up on the scent, even if it's just a tiny bit that's too small for you to even feel. Isn't that why some animals chew bones?"

"I…I don't know," I said. "Does chewing bones really remove food from your teeth? Where did you learn that?"

"From working with dogs," she said. "If you give them something to chew on, like a bone, it helps with oral hygiene."

"Ah," I said. "Maybe I should get in the habit of chewing bones, then. Not really much in the way of toothbrushes or dental floss here. I suppose we're missing a lot of creature comforts."

"Do you really miss dental floss?" said Octavia. "I don't. I've never even thought about it until now. It's just…this is the life we have."

"And you're content enough that there's no need to fantasize about other lives?"

She shook her head. "It's more like….I never even considered those other lives in the first place. I'm a spider. So what would be the point of thinking about anything else? It's not as if thinking about being a human is going to make me human."

"No, I guess not." I looked at the spot where the ironhide hyena had been, the ground still stained with its blood. "Anyway, no need to linger here."

We returned inside, and I followed Octavia to the lower tunnel (climbing the wall myself, rather than allowing her to carry me). As we entered the tunnel, I thought to ask her about a coordinate system.

"Hey, Octavia," I said. "What do you call this tunnel?"

"Oh, this is the Little Dip tunnel," she said.

"Ah," I said. The name made sense, considering that the tunnel did have a notable dip partway through. "Is that your naming system? You identify each tunnel with a notable landmark, or defining feature?"

"Yeah," she said. "I'm not sure what else you would call a tunnel like this."

I decided not to suggest an alternative. A system of names like "sublevel 1, south" like I had been using in my own head would have made things more legible to me as someone trying to learn things for the first time, but it was probably easier for me to adopt Octavia's naming convention for the tunnels rather than forcing her to relearn names that I came up with. Bureaucrats trying to lay out cities hated identifiers like 'yellow brick house at the end of the block,' but it wasn't as if we were managing a neighborhood that had to be made legible to a mail carrier or census taker.

"Got it," I said. "Little Dip tunnel." Sublevel 1, south, was only silently added in my head.

As we proceeded down the eponymous 'little dip' and made our way to where Octavia's layered web wall arrangement stood, I was surprised to see that one ant seemed to have broken past the first tier of webbing. Before, her web defenses had struck me as unnecessarily excessive, but I now found myself grateful for the multiple levels of failsafes she had installed, reminding myself that most of these layers had been added only in the past few days: I was the one who had instigated the incident that had required her to beef up security.

One by one, Octavia lowered her vertical web "walls," which I now realized were much like modular web nets that she could apparently relocate at will. After exposing a path to the outermost wall, she scooped up all of the ant remains, carefully picked the webs off of them with two of her claws, and tossed them back to me. She called back. "These are for you to eat."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Thanks for dinner," I said, chomping down on the nearest one.

"Dinner is later," she said. "This is just an appetizer."

She sent a dozen more fire ant carcasses my way, and I greedily devoured them, growing giddy with anticipation. If this was what qualified as a mere appetizer, I was eager for what dinner was in store.

After sending the ant remains my way, she repaired the damage to her outermost web wall (which seemed to be pretty minimal), poked it at several points to test it, then made her way back down the passage, hanging her web "walls" up behind her as she walked. As she rearranged the webbing behind her, I asked, "How do you do that?"

"Do what?" she asked.

"I mean, the webs stick to the ants, but not to you," I said. "Come to think of it, I guess that's a feature of every spider. The webs catch prey, but the spiders can walk around on their own webs without issue."

"Not all of the threads are sticky," she said. "I just grab the parts that aren't sticky."

"Ah," I said. "And you must have some kind of pattern that lets you know which parts are going to be the non-sticky parts that are safe to touch.

"Not really," said Octavia. "I just know."

"Know how?"

She shrugged. "I just do."

'Spider's intuition' was a totally reasonable answer, but it was a disappointing one. I had sort of hoped that there was some rule that I could keep in mind — even if I lacked the sort of long, dexterous limbs that would have allowed me to navigate Octavia's webs with the same ease that she did, it was a bit of a bummer that "which webs are sticky, and which aren't" was apparently proprietary knowledge. Then again, that trade secret was an important part of our security. It might also be part of why an ant had managed to get past the first web: it had happened, by sheer chance, to find a series of non-sticky threads that let it proceed down the tunnel enough to get caught in her second vertical web trap. If twenty octillion monkeys could bang out a Shakespeare play through sheer trial and error, then it stood to reason that out of scores of ants, some might find a crack to slip through.

"Are you done eating?" said Octavia, interrupting my thought.

I looked down at half a dozen ants in front of me. "Not yet, but I can be." I scarfed down one of the ants, swallowing it whole. "Are you going to eat any?"

"Later," she said. "It takes longer for me."

I nodded. Her mandibles were sharp, but she didn't have a flexible jaw structure like I did. I couldn't quite unhinge my jaw to the same degree that some snakes did, but my jaw flexibility was definitely one of the traits about me that seemed the most reptilian.

Several seconds of swallowing (and very little chewing) later, we headed back.

"By the way," I said. "What do you call the, uh, central chasm? The big hole that connects to all of the tunnels, I mean."

She looked at me. "It's the central chasm. I guess that can be its official name, if you want it to be."

"Glad we're agreed on that," I said. "So where are we going next?"

Octavia rocked from side to side, as if she were weighing two options. "Let's go to the Sparkling Vault." She led the way to a tunnel several levels below the 'little dip' tunnel, and as soon as the tunnel fed out into a larger chamber, I could see the reason she'd chosen the name. It was by far the most spacious cavern I'd seen in this underground network, and best illuminated: huge chunks of glowstone protruded from the cavern ceiling, which arched in a way that gave the impression of a vaulted ceiling. One wall of the cave, I noted, was also almost completely smooth — and I heard the drip of water that served as a clue as to why it was smooth. It was an incredibly slow drip, but water, given time, would erode mountains.

The ceiling wasn't even the most interesting thing about the Sparkling Vault. While the glowstone was so high up that it provided only dim illumination this far down, along the walls of the chasm, I could see the texture of something fuzzy. As I got closer, I realized it was moss, and in several places, I could even see leaves that looked like ivy. Plants! They were the first vegetation that I had seen underground. I turned to Octavia. "Is this stuff safe to touch?" I asked, pointing at the leaves.

"Why wouldn't it be?" she said.

"Poison ivy is a thing," I said. "And, you know, these look like ivy leaves."

Octavia walked over and touched a leaf, as if to make a point.

"Okay," I said, "It's safe to spiders. But what about to me? I'm pretty sure actual poison ivy isn't dangerous to insects, either. It itches because of an allergic reaction. I think maybe it only affects mammals, because there are some real-world bird species that eat the berries off of those plants, and it's not as if touching the leaves harms them.."

"Actual? Real world?" said Octavia. "I'm pretty sure this place is the 'real world' now."

"Point taken," I said. "It's just, I don't know what I don't know, you know?"

"No, you don't know."

I sighed. "Well, there's one way I know of to gather experimental data." I reached out and touched one of the leaves.

Octavia looked at me with an expression that seemed to ask, "Why did you do that?" I decided to answer her unspoken question. "I wanted to know if it would make me itchy. Seems like it doesn't. And I'm not dead, either. That's also good to know, considering that 'poison plants that kill you instantly' might not be off the table in a setting like this."

"That would be an extremely stupid way to die," said Octavia. "But you touched it anyway. Why?"

"You also touched it," I pointed out.

"Yeah," she said. "But I wasn't worried about it being dangerous. You were, and you touched it anyway. Why?"

"Because information is useful," I said. "Sometimes you need to take a risk to gather experimental data. We didn't know for sure that mammals could survive a trip to space until the late 1950's, when we sent a rocket with several monkeys up for a brief round-trip. And sometimes, the only test subject you have available is yourself. Science isn't always safe."

"Touching a leaf isn't exactly an Apollo mission," said Octavia. "And nothing even happened when you touched it."

"That also counts as information," I said. "I confirmed the null hypothesis. Anyway, there's lots of information to be discovered down here. There's plants!" I looked up at the glowstone that studded the vaulted ceiling — cave roof — overhead. "Probably because of the light, I'm guessing? Glowstone could act as a subterranean light source for photosynthetic plants." I looked around for other vegetation, remembering what she had shown me earlier. "Is this where you grow your fruit?"

"No," said Octavia, speaking quietly.

"Yeah," I said. "That makes sense. The light here is pretty dim; that's why there's so much moss. Moss doesn't need much light to grow. Fruit probably requires a lot more photosynthesis. And you'd need a lot of fruit trees to get a steady diet of fruit. I bet you must have a whole farm down here somewhere, huh?"

"Something like that," said Octavia, again speaking softly.

There was something about her tone that struck me as…not exactly evasive, but she was being more terse and quiet in her speech than usual. Did she not want to talk about her fruit-farming operation? It suddenly occurred to me that where she got her fruit from was a matter of great strategic importance for Octavia: asking her for information about the location was sort of akin to asking for the keys to her storehouse. It wasn't a subject that I would have considered to be out of bounds, considering that she, on multiple occasions, had saved my life, and I had saved hers, but maybe I had assumed we had a closer bond than we actually had. In a manner of speaking, I was still her guest; I could understand if she was reluctant to hand me the keys to the kingdom. Not that I cared much about her fruit farm for my own self-interest — I was a carnivore, after all — but there were lots of things I was curious about, and this didn't seem like an issue that was worth pressing at the moment.

"Anyway," I said. "You brought me down here for a reason, I assume."

"Yes," said Octavia. "This is a pretty significant choke point." She began scaling the wall — the one opposite the wall that had been worn smooth by the constant drip of water — and I followed her up with some difficulty. As I got closer to the glowstone ceiling, I realized what I had missed when looking up from above: there was a lip that overlooked the Sparkling Vault, leading to a wide tunnel. The path down it ended with a series of tiered wall web traps, like the Little Dip tunnel, with one key exception: there were dozens…maybe even more than a hundred ants caught in the web. As Octavia began temporarily disassembling her inner web walls to begin the task of clearing out the tunnel and repairing the webs that had broken, I could see that the ants that out of the scores of ants, two of them had managed to make it past three tiers of webbing — fortunately, there were five layers total, meaning that there were still multiple failsafes that the ants had failed to clear out.

At this point, Octavia was shoveling the ant remains out of the tunnel, not bothering to pick the web off them, instead preferring to bundle them into packages of between five and ten ants each, which she flung my way (and which I arranged neatly at the overhang). As Octavia began spinning new replacement webs, I began clawing at the ant bundles to get a head start on feeding. As I opened the bundle, I saw that multiple ants were gripping something in their mandibles, and I realized that I was seeing unexpected leaves for the second time in as many minutes."

"Uh, Octavia," I said, "Is there a reason that these ants came through here carrying leaves?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "They do that now."

"What do you mean by 'now?' This is a recent development?"

"Yes," she said. "I noticed it a few days ago, when the ants flooded the tunnel for the second time. A bunch of them were carrying random things. Most of them were small pebbles at first, barely larger than grains of sand. Now some of them carry leaves."

I poked at a leaf, dislodging it from the ant's lifeless mandibles. I watched as the leaf fluttered off the edge of the precipice, past the rows of glowstone protrusions, casting shadows against the wall as it fell. I looked at another ant. This one held not a leaf, but what looked like a clump of moss. Then, I looked at the web bundling that held them, and saw more leaves, scattered throughout it. I poked at another one of the leaves, and realized that my claw was trembling. "Hey, Octavia? Remember what I said earlier about how sometimes gathering experimental data requires doing things that are dangerous?"

"Yes," she said. "Why?"

I took a shaky breath. "I think the ants might be experimenting."