From sleeping while sheltered, your health has been fully restored From sleeping while sheltered, your stamina has been fully restored

I awoke in the cave's upper passageway, close enough to the entrance to see that the sun had set. By this point, my sleep schedule seemed to be fully nocturnal, and I wasn't sure exactly how I felt about that. It had been a few days since I'd enjoyed actual daylight, and it was a convenience that I wasn't one to take for granted. While it was convenient that my eyes had adjusted to the low-light conditions of Octavia's cave, I wasn't sure if a lack of exposure to sunlight would do me any harm as far as increasing my eye's sensitivity.

I called out for Octavia. Hearing nothing in response, I marched to the central chasm and began climbing down, calling out at each of the entrances to the caves, first trying the Little Dip tunnel, then the Vault, and finally the Pebbleway. There were several other tunnels, including two that were approximately level with the Pebbleway, and it was from one of those holes that Octavia finally emerged.

"You're up," she said.

"Yeah," I said. "Yesterday, you promised to show me the Shimmergrove."

"You're fighting fit?" she said.

"Fully recharged," I said, a bit unnerved by her choice of words. I recalled her warning from yesterday: the Shimmergrove is not a friendly place. I cleared my throat nervously. "Just how dangerous is this place?"

"It's safe, most of the time," she said. "But you can never be too sure. Follow me." She started skittering down the tunnel she'd just emerged from, and I climbed after her, parading down a winding tunnel that gradually descended downward. We got to a part where Octavia had to remove several web partitions for us to proceed forward. As soon as I passed through the web "gates," she immediately sealed them back up behind me. Apparently, this is where Octavia's territory ended.

As I followed her further past the perimeter of "home," I asked, "Does this place get a lot of traffic?"

"Not as much as you might think," she said. "Most of the activity is at the bottom, down where it's damper. And brighter."

I followed Octavia through the tunnel to a part where it opened into a larger chamber. "Careful," she said, and I suddenly realized that I was standing less than a foot away from the edge of a sheer drop. I took a few steps back out of reflex, then cautiously walked up to the edge to take a look at what lay below us. It was hard to make out the shape of anything, given that the pathway we were on was so dimly illuminated, but down below us, I could see the unmistakable shine of glowstone far below us. Little of the illumination made it this high up, but it was still enough to see by.

"How high up are we?" I asked.

"A better question might be how deep the Shimmergrove lies," she said. "It's…maybe a mile?"

"Really? A whole mile down?" I asked. The pit went deep, but a mile sounded too high to be plausible.

"No, I mean a mile around," said Octavia, waving one of her front leg in a circle. After studying the cavern, I suddenly understood what she was gesturing at: the 'Shimmergrove,' as Octavia had called it, was located at the bottom of a bowl-like formation, and we stood on what was essentially the rim. Ahead of us, there was a path that spiraled down, and if we traveled around the circumference of the downward spiral, it would eventually deposit us down at the bottom.

"That's a long way to travel," I said.

"I know," said Octavia. "We're not going all the way down. Just close enough for me to reach the trees."

I looked down, squinting and trying to see what lay below us. "I don't see any trees."

"You will," she said. "It's a long way down, but you'll be able to see it. Follow me, and don't get too close to the edge. If you feel the ground under you start to move, then back up. Don't try to turn around; backpedal."

"Understood," I said.

"How's your sense of smell?" she asked.

"Good enough," I said. "I can pick up the smell of rotting meat from a pretty good distance. Ditto for your webs, though after spending so long in your tunnels, I've kind of grown acclimated to the scent."

"That's good," she said. "If you smell something that smells like rotten eggs, it means you might be near a steam vent, and you should keep your distance."

I nodded. "Sulfur." A telltale sign of geothermal activity. "Hey, we're not close to an active volcano, are we?"

"Huh?" said Octavia. "Why? Does the rotten egg smell mean that we're near a volcano?"

"No," I said. "Like you said, it could just be from hydrothermal vents, or geysers. Those kinds are often found around volcanoes, but the presence of a vent doesn't necessarily imply the presence of a volcano."

"I see," said Octavia. "Well, I've never seen a volcano erupt. I'll be sure to let you know if I do witness a volcanic eruption."

"I appreciate it, though a volcanic eruption strikes me as the kind of thing would be hard to miss. And I'll keep my eye out for that rotten egg smell. Or…keep my nose out."

"Good," she said. "Anything that smells like that could be dangerous, and you should keep your distance. And if you smell something that's funny that's not like rotten eggs, then it might be toxic and you should definitely keep your distance."

I appreciated that Octavia was finally in the mood to start volunteering information. I was already eager to learn as much as I could about what lay in the underground portion of the desert, and warnings about potential dangers were exactly the sort of unsolicited information that was most valuable.

I followed Octavia along the winding narrow path, slowly descending deeper and deeper toward the Shimmergrove. The progress was slow, but as we got lower, I could tell that the path before us was becoming visibly more illuminated. And in the soft glow, I could recognize a familiar shape along the pathway. Ants. I glowered at their shapes for a moment, before realizing that they weren't moving. Octavia walked past them without a care. I slowly walked up to one, and touched it with my claw, only to watch as the exoskeleton crumbled. Ant husks. I thought back to the day before, when Octavia had dined on ants by liquifying their innards before sucking their guts out, leaving only the husks behind. I called after her. "Did you do this?"

"Do what?" she asked.

I pointed to one of the ant husks that was still intact. "One of your previous meals?"

"No," she said. "Must have been some other bug predator."

"Another spider?" I asked.

"I doubt it," she said. "I don't sense any of my kin nearby, and I don't know of any other spider species down here."

"Then what did this?"

"Assassin bugs, probably," she said.

"This world has assassin bugs?"

"The world we're from has assassin bugs," she said. "Bee assassins, feather-legged assassins, ambush bugs…the assassin bugs here aren't so different from the ones back on earth. Just…bigger."

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I poked another one of the ant husks, and watched it crumble. "Hey," I said. "Do you think these are safe to eat?" I snuffed at the crumpled remains.

"The best bits are already gone," Octavia said. "But you can give it a taste. If you collapse, I'll carry you back."

I bent down and greedily lapped up the crumbs of the ant husks. As expected, they weren't filling; my [satiety] meter blinked momentarily, but didn't raise so much as a percentage. "You're right," I said. "Whoever killed these ants already sucked out the best of the nutrients."

Then, I looked at another discarded ant husk, and realized it was different in shape from the husks Octavia had discarded the day before.

"Hey," I said. "These aren't fire ants." I studied the shape. "I've seen these before. They're armored ants. Or the remains of armored ants, anyway."

"Is that cause for concern?" said Octavia.

"No," I said. "It's just been awhile since I've seen one of these. It's the fire ants that seem to have it out for us. Don't think I've ever had a quarrel with an armored ant, apart from them stealing my food, and then me attacking them to steal it back. No lasting grudge, though. At least, I hope." I thought back to the fire ant hordes that Octavia and I had fought, their monochromatic red hue permanently etched in my mind. There hadn't been a single black-colored armored ant among them. Quite a contrast from the hyenas we'd fought yesterday, who seemed content to hunt alongside other hyena variants.

"Are you done looking?" asked Octavia.

I looked up at her, then back down at the black armored ant exoskeleton. "Yeah," I said. I scarfed down the last of the ant remains, then resumed following her.

We were maybe fifty feet above the tops of the Shimmergrove trees — close enough for me to make out the shapes of individual trees below us — when Octavia led me away from the main trail onto a protruding rock that overlooked the basin. She found what looked like a sturdy rock and began spinning her thread.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Setting up a rappel point," she said.

"Rappel point?"

Octavia nodded. "Your job is to make sure that nothing nasty is waiting for me when I come back up." She began lowering herself from the rock outcrop down toward the trees below.

"Wait!" I called.

"What is it?" she asked.

"What should I look out for?"

"You'll be fine," she said. "The most dangerous creatures in the Shimmergrove never come up this high. If you get attacked, just use your stinky breath. I'll be back in a jiffy."

I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that, but I chose to trust Octavia, and watched as she lowered herself, eventually growing so distant that she was but a speck in the distance below, and at a certain point I lost her shape entirely. I saw a disturbance and a rustling of leaves. Then, perhaps a minute later, I saw her returning, climbing back upward with two pieces of fruit speared on her two front legs. She climbed back onto the rock without my assistance.

"Good haul?" I asked.

Octavia looked at me for a moment. "Are you being sarcastic?"

So, not a good haul, apparently. I shrugged. "I don't know what a good haul is. I presume you can go back down for more."

"The whole area is covered with bugs," she said.

"Isn't killing bugs kind of our speciality? Or yours, at least."

"It's hard for me to fight bugs when I'm hanging by a thread," she said. "So, new plan. I'll lower you down, and you can poison them all to death, and grab some fruit while you're at it."

"Uh…" I paused. "Are you sure about that?"

"Of course I am," she said. "My thread's strong enough. I'll have to lower you down from up here, so that I don't get caught in the gas attack, but don't worry, I won't let you fall. My thread is solid."

It was true that she had used her thread to loft me through the central chasm of her tunnel network before, but being lowered from this height — into something that I didn't know the nature of — left me with a sense of unease.

"Let's just try it," said Octavia, holding a thread aloft. "May I?"

It took me a moment to realize what Octavia was asking permission for, then grasped her meaning and stepped forward, allowing her to loop her thread around me several times. That was good — the thicker, the better. Then, she lifted me into the air, raising me with one of her legs so that I hung several inches above the rock path.

"Let's test some signals," she said. "Give the thread a quick flick."

I tentatively reached out, and flicked at the thread with my foreleg, wincing in fear that it might break, but it held.

"That's good," she said. "I can feel that. And don't worry, this thread is different from what I normally spin my webs with. I bet even your claws can't cut through this. Not without considerable effort, anyway."

"Hey," I said, unsure if I should resent the insinuation that my claws were too dull to cut through her thread.

"Try it," she said. "Bend it as much as you want. Better for you to test the limits when you're a safe distance from the ground."

I pawed at the thread, jabbing it, tugging it, and at one point even running my claw against it, and it still held.

Octavia flicked the thread, and it reverberated with an almost silent twang. "How about this: flick the thread when you're ready for me to stop lowering you. If you flick it once again while you're still, that means raise. And two flicks means the opposite, if you need more slack."

"Okay," I said, testing the thread again.

"See if your teeth can break it," she said. I paused, and Octavia seemed to sense my hesitation, because she lowered me to the ground. She backed up, holding the threat taut, and I gnawed at it, managing to chew my way through it after several seconds of effort. Once I found the right way to get my teeth around it, I could slice through it with relative ease.

"That's good," she said. "You can cut yourself loose if worse comes to worst."

"Cut myself free…and drop into the abyss?"

"I mean, after you're down there, maybe you need to cut yourself free for some reason. I don't know. Better to know the limits of my thread, right?"

"Point taken," I said.

Octavia tied a fresh thread around me. "Ready?"

"I'd prefer if I had a better idea of what I was about to be lowered into…" I said.

"It'll be easy," she said. "There aren't any steam vents around this specific part. So just beware of anything that smells funny, and I'll pull you up if things get bad. The critters down there are weak. You know how to deal with bugs."

"Is there a reason we're not just walking down there?" I asked.

"This is faster," said Octavia. "And safer. You won't even have to touch the ground. The closer you get to the ground, the more potential for danger."

"Not sounding so safe," I said.

She shook her head. "Nothing is ever completely safe. But it's safer for me to lower you by a thread than for us to walk and encounter more of the dangers that lie along the path. There's possible breaks in the ground, carnivorous plants…"

"Carnivorous plants?"

"They don't move," she reassured me. "And they look for prey on the Shimmergrove floor. You won't even be close enough for them to matter. This is why we're harvesting the fruit from above. You will avoid so many hazards with this approach."

I sighed, trying to suppress my anxiety. "Alright. Let's get this over with." The thread around me tightened as Octavia hefted me off the platform, and my gradual descent toward the Shimmergrove began.

As she lowered me, I could see that most of the tallest trees were located closest to the perimeter of the Shimmergrove, hewing closest to the walls of the "bowl," and I quickly realized why: the rock walls were studded with glowstone, and the glowstone was, I presumed, the light source that they relied on for photosynthesis. In the same way that a normal tree's leaves and branches were designed to capture light from the sun overhead, the trees trunks and branches bowed to better capture the light that shone from the cavern's luminous walls, with many leaves flattened up against the wall so as to maximize their exposure.

The trees were just one of many parts of the Shimmergrove that felt off somehow, like there was something fundamentally familiar-yet-wrong about this place. Below the trees, I could make out the outline of foliage below, which seemed to attach itself to the ground: rather than reach toward the sky, plants that had the appearance of ferns had found little pockets of glowstone on the ground and were jealously clinging to the floor, with their illuminated outline telling the full story, like a shadow being projected upward from the ground instead of onto it. It was a glimpse into an upside-down ecosystem, an alternate reality where the light came from the ground and the walls, rather than shining from the sky directly overhead. Everything below me painted an "inverse shadow," concealing the light that the ground emitted, including the leaves of the trees, each individual leaf bearing a serrated edge that resembled the jagged edge of a steak knife.

The plants were shockingly stationary: there was no wind down here to rattle the leaves. That stillness in the plants, however, only made it easier to see the movement of the creatures around the plants. Every time I saw a leaf shake, I could follow the branch that it was on, and almost surely spot an armored ant, or a caterpillar, or some kind of beetle that I didn't recognize. Octavia had been right: this place was positively teeming with insect life.

I watched the scene below me grow closer and closer. I was 50 feet from the top of the treeline, then 30 feet, and 20 feet. Then, my movement stopped. I looked up, and in the distance, I thought I could see Octavia waving at me, though the illumination at her height was hard for me to make out. Was she waiting for me to give her a signal? Or a reminder? One flick of the line to pull out, two flicks for more slack. She was giving me a choice of whether to proceed or not. Or, she wanted to make sure I had the lay of the land before she lowered me any closer. Either way, now was my chance to back out if things seemed too dangerous.

I scanned the Shimmergrove below for anything that could be a plausible threat. The insects were numerous, to be sure, but there wasn't any cluster of them that seemed particularly problematic. At any rate, whatever breath attack I used would likely rule the day. And, if worse came to worst, I could always signal the retreat. I flicked the line twice — it held my weight without issue — and a moment later, I found myself sinking deeper toward the trees below.