Octavia and I followed the pointing glowstone arrow up the Shimmergrove path. As the glowing arrow ended, I saw small glowing points that dotted the path upward, forming a continuous line with markers placed every ten feet or so.

"Seems like the armored ants want us to go all the way up the path," I said.

"That would take us awfully close to our old home," said Octavia.

"Is that a problem?" I asked.

"Well, that dragon might still be around…"

"True," I said. "Even if the armored ants might not mean us any harm, they probably don't know that dragons are kin sensitive. In a sense, they don't know as much as we do about what that dragon might be capable of. But that information asymmetry runs both ways."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked.

"We know things the ants don't," I said. "But they have access to more information than we do. Assuming that they do somehow represent some kind of collective intelligence – which is probably true to some extent if they're drawing arrows on the ground to point us in a particular direction – then maybe we should trust that the ants know what they're doing."

"Okay," said Octavia after a brief pause. "Let's go."

We continued our trek up the passage, passing the steam vents for what was now the fourth time, without any incident.

"Nice of them to leave us a breadcrumb trail," Octavia said, as we followed the glowing path.

"Even better than breadcrumbs," I said. "Glowstone doesn't have an expiration date, or if it does, it's certainly more durable than breadcrumbs. Not that I expect that we'll need to find our way back."

The path eventually led us all the way back to the top of the path, to the entrance of the place that Octavia and I used to call home. The entrance was blocked by rock, but the armored ants had marked the opening with glowstone.

"What do they want us to do?" she asked. "The entrance is blocked thanks to the cave-in."

I glanced around, looking for other markings, which were easy to see: the relative darkness of the upper Shimmergrove path made even small bits of glowstone hard to miss. "Look up there," I said. "See that fissure, up above the tunnel entrance? They've marked it with little bits of glowstone. And it looks like there's a smaller gap, up above it."

"Those holes are also too tiny for us to get through," she said.

"True," I said. "But they're probably big enough for an ant to get through."

"So what good does that do us?" she asked. "They can go through the holes, but we can't follow them."

"I was thinking of the other ants. You said that fire ants generally aren't found in the Shimmergrove, but today, they managed to find their way down here. I think that these gaps – these fissures opened up by the dragon's attack – are what allowed them to get from the upper tunnels to the Shimmergrove path. Clearly, the armored ants weren't happy about that: they were making a point of hunting down every fire ant that made its way down here."

"Yes," she said. "They seemed to do a very thorough job. Their fire ant hunt was almost ruthless in how efficient it was."

"They killed all of the fire ants that entered through the holes," I said. "They did their part. I think they led us back here because they wanted us to plug the holes. And by 'us,' I mean 'you.'"

"That does seem to be logical," she said. "Are you sure it's okay for me to do it, though? What if the armored ants are using these tunnels? What if, by sealing them up, I'm trapping them up there?"

"Then they'll deal with it," I said. "They'll figure out how to survive topside, or maybe a few armored ants will die up there. Even if that does happen, it doesn't seem like a terrible offense: we've killed armored ants before – I've done so intentionally on several occasions – and it doesn't seem like they hold a grudge, based on how they seem interested in cooperating with us now. Using your webs to patch up these holes seems like the most cooperative thing we could do."

"Alright, let me handle it," said Octavia as she skittered up the wall to the highest (and smallest) of the gaps, which was so high that it overhung the path we stood on.. She spun a web with her two front legs, and reached into the crevasse in the ceiling, pushing her web deep into the hole. From down below, I watched as she inserted her webs into the gap, covering its entire span, until the gaping hole was now completely covered with her sticky trap. After several minutes of web-spinning, she tapped the outermost layer, testing its strength. "Done."

"One down, and two more to go," I said.

As Octavia went to work plugging the next fissure, I noticed several armored ants marching up the path toward us, a group of four of them. They stopped a short distance away and seemed to tilt their heads upward, almost as if they were looking up just like I was.

"We've got company," I said.

"Huh?"

"Nothing to worry about," I said. "At least, they seem friendly to me. They're not making any moves to stop you, which is a good sign that we're on the right path. Seems like they wanted to come and spectate your work."

"In that case, I'll make sure that my web-spinning is up to their standards," she said, her tone jovial. "I'd hate for my craftsmanship to get a negative review."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Well, I'm sure you'll do a fine job, even if you have to do the job with the foreman looking over your shoulder."

I sat with the ants, watching as Octavia plugged the remaining holes. After she climbed back, the ants began marching back down the path. Octavia and I sat motionless, watching as they walked, until they stopped and turned around, looking back at us.

"Are they waiting for us to bid them farewell?" she said.

"Maybe," I said. "But to me, it looks more like an invitation for us to follow them."

"Nice of them to do it in person this time, rather than giving us a cryptic trail to follow," she said.

As we followed them, more armored ants joined the procession. As we walked down the path, the ants scooped up the small bits of glowstone that had illuminated the path during our journey up the slope.

"Why didn't they just have us follow the first time?" asked Octavia. "It would have saved them the trouble of constructing this elaborate breadcrumb trail."

"It could just be the evolution of trust," I said. "Leaving a bunch of trail markers leaves less potential for conflict. It removes the potential for a fight to break out if there's a misunderstanding."

"And what's changed since then?" she asked.

"These ants didn't come out until after you started patching the wall," I said. "Up until then, their communication was solely through the glowstone markers. They left us a message, we understood it, and we demonstrated our willingness to cooperate with them. Or at least you did. You were the one doing all the hard work."

"You also demonstrated cooperation," she said. "You didn't attack them when they came to watch."

"True," I said. "Now that we've established a rapport, it seems that they're more comfortable with getting more up close and personal. At least, that's my read of it. Maybe I'm just projecting. People do have a tendency to anthropomorphize the creatures they encounter."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Anthropomorphism?" I asked. "When people see animals behave a certain way, we tend to look at their actions through a human lens, assuming that they must have motivations similar to us. Like someone who finds that their dog has chewed up their nicest pair of shoes, and assumes that the dog must have done this out of spite or resentment over being left in the house for a long time. In reality, the dog doesn't have any concept of 'ownership' of various objects, and probably chewed them up because it was bored, and the shoes just happened to be within reach, or had a particularly chewable shape and texture."

"That's funny," said Octavia. "I kind of know what you're talking about. Back in my previous life, spent a lot of time working with dogs, and they behaved in all sorts of ways that were confusing to me. I always assumed it was because I was too dumb to figure out their behavior. But maybe it's because the dogs were too dumb for their behavior to make any logical sense."

"I'm not sure if it makes the dogs dumb," I said. "But I don't think it means you're dumb, either. It seems like anyone can make the same mistake. Everyone assumes that the way their mind works is 'normal,' and therefore everyone else must be motivated by the same things we are. It's why people in debates so often accuse each other of lying when they encounter opposing beliefs, or try to ascribe sinister motives to the people they disagree with. It's hard to imagine that someone might actually have a completely different way of seeing the world."

"Do you think that we've made that mistake?" she asked. "Have we ascribed sinister motives to others when there might have been a reasonable explanation for what they were doing?"

"Are you talking about the fire ants?" I asked, grateful that the ants leading us down the path were black and not red. "I don't think so. I mean, they've repeatedly made it clear that they desperately want to kill both of us. That fact is not in dispute. And if that much is true, then I don't think it particularly matters what their motives are. Maybe they're evil and sinister, or maybe they have some reasoned justification for what they're doing, or maybe they're operating by pure instinct. But regardless of why they're doing it, if they succeed in achieving their goals, both of us will wind up dead."

"True," she said. "I guess their motivations don't matter."

"I mean, their motivations matter to us from a strategic point of view," I said. "Like, if we know their motivations, then it could help us better plan what to expect from them. If their motivations were based on reason, then we might try to appeal to them based on reason. But in terms of our goals, I don't think it changes anything."

"What do you suppose the armored ants' goals are?" she said. "I know that you just said there are risks to ascribing human-like motivations to their behavior, but they defeated our enemy, and now they seem to have conscripted us as their helpers. It seems to me like those two things might be connected."

"True," I said. "I think the most promising part is that they seem to be making attempts at communication. I just wish we had a better way to communicate."

"Yes," she said. "I suppose you and I know a lot about the potential for misunderstanding when two parties can't communicate directly with each other."

I smiled, thinking back on our first encounter, before I'd gained the ability to speak. "I don't think that any of these ants will be opening up their mouths to talk to us," I said. "But I'm open to being proven wrong."

After several more minutes of walking, we arrived at the vent-scarred part of the path dotted with holes, including the one hole that we had declared our new home 'niche,' still marked with Octavia's web. The ants paused for a moment, then began climbing up the wall. I watched as a line of a dozen black ants climbed up away from the glow of the Shimmergrove, into a part of the wall shrouded in shadow, and then…seemed to vanish.

"Where did they go?" she asked.

"I can see as much as you," I said. "Which is to say, not much. Maybe that's the point. It could be an entrance that they made in a place where it would be hard to spot. Or, maybe it was already there, and they picked it because it's naturally so well-hidden. Either way, it seems that they've disclosed some kind of secret."

I looked at the dark part of the wall where the ants seemed to be disappearing, and after several moments, a faint glow appeared. "Glowstone," I said. "Turning on the front lights as an invitation to guests." In dim illumination of the glowstone, I could see what looked like the outline of a tunnel entrance, this one perhaps barely large enough for a creature of my size to crawl through. "Seems like we're being summoned to join them."

"Shall we?" she asked. "Or…"

"Or what?"

"Do you think it's safe to follow them?" she said.

I tilted my head upward, looking at the faint glow of the shadow-shrouded ant tunnel, the entrance to a place that was otherwise bathed in blackness. It could hold anything.

I turned around, and walked to the edge of the spiraling Shimmergrove path, looking down at the Shimmergrove below us, its eerie glow painting haunting shadows of trees, a woodland teeming with centipedes, assassin bugs, along with other hazards Octavia had warned me about, like toxic plants and carnivorous plants.

"We've followed the ants this far, and they haven't led us astray yet," I said. "Who knows? The place they're taking us might turn out to be the safest place in this underground ecosystem."

"Do you really believe that?" she asked.

"Only one way to find out," I said as I dug my claw into the jagged vertical rock wall and began climbing after the ants.