I was used to Ansei’s half spent nights of sleep. They were much like my own. But during our journey, my exhaustion couldn’t be overcome with a short three-or-four-hour sleep. I rose late morning to find without surprise the bed beside mine abandoned. It was just as well. I wanted privacy for the next few hours at least.

In the dark of the crystal chamber, I rose on the balls of my feet and dragged my fingers across the spines of the volumes, searching by feel. My mother’s volume was covered in sheep’s skin. Impossible to mistake. I brought it back to the mouth of the cave, hugging the soft cover to my chest.

At the mouth of the cave, I sat lotus style and opened the leaves to read by the light of the new day’s sun.

I had not known whether I would even be able to decipher her hand-written calligraphy, but from my first glance at the page, my mind opened up wide, and I comprehended the characters with decision and speed I had never possessed before. Whole passages leapt from the page, transformed from cold characters into images: visions of my mother, her warm beating heart, and her brave, albeit willful decision. I stared, captivated by the pages before me for hours.

This woman was my own mother?

Yes. A soft voice spoke from somewhere deep inside of me. The voice resounded distinct, separate, and yet indivisible from my own person, and I couldn’t suppress the instinct that my mother was near me, watching with interest.

Finally, I turned the last page and the leaf came loose in my hand. I stared at its clean, fresh, rice paper face and realized it was an insert, added much later than the account I had recently finished. The calligraphy was identical to my mother’s own hand. I read:

Dearest Furi:

How I love you and long for your success and happiness. If you read this, I hope you will understand and forgive me for surrendering you to a life of such sorrow. One day I will amend this hardship, but you must come to me.

I do not wish to interfere with your choices any more than is absolutely vital for you and our line, but I feel I must inject this briefest instruction now.

Do not unite with the Earth Kumo. This union will give the Kumo access to the immortal Skies, a passage they have long desired and has been rightly denied them.

I trust you will feel the justice in this and follow my instructions.

She signed this script, your devoted mother, Orihime.

I stared at the text, my breath coming rapid and shallow as I read and reread—trying to understand what this meant. For some moments, I gazed into the bright light of day, confused by the meaning of my mother’s message.

With effort, I heaved the breath I had been holding too long in my lungs and let the truth settle where it fell like beads of red dye upon the face of a pure white fabric.

My mother forbade me to love Ansei? And this because she did not want to give the Earth Kumo access to the Heavens?

I didn’t know how long I sat, turning this instruction over in my head, but during that time, something shifted.

A new pattern rose up, and the problem I confronted took on an added dimension. My notions of betrayal altered, opened up in a new way of thinking. My mother’s letter forced it upon me. I had never given my immortal life the weight she gave it. She had left me alone from infancy, never interfering in my earthly life once. The immortal realm was all she thought of. Why? Was time really so brief?

The range of immortality was a difficult concept for me to understand, but I had to try to conceive of it its enormous breadth. Was a mortal experience nothing… ?

Would a child with Ansei cement his standing in new worlds? Forever?

Though I had given our immortality almost no thought, my mother was the opposite. Eternity was her every demand. It was the thing she wished to foreclose against all contingencies. She did not want an Earth Kumo son.

Anger burned in my core forever.

I did not care that my mother had forbidden this. I had proved Ansei in every way and I could scarcely bear to look at the rejection my mother’s letter meant to me, and to Ansei.

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And yet I did look at it. I read it again and again, and could not reconcile it with my mother’s own record. Did she realize what she asked of me? How could she fail to empathize? Especially when considering her own mortal choice in a husband!

I hated it, but I forced myself to consider whether I could abide my mother’s instruction. Could I save Ansei’s mortal life and deny him eternity? I could not do that.

* * *

In the end, the way did open up for me—not as I had hoped, or anticipated, but I knew what I would do.

I prepared without haste. Of what would follow, I had only the vaguest idea. I supposed I would have a child; bring it to Western Capital and pass it off as an heir to the throne.

I didn’t know what it would cost to give life this way. How did the children of Vega and Altair pass to the Heavens? Would I simply transcend, or would what was arachnid inside of me demand my own transition? Perhaps it would, and if that were the case, then so be it.

I didn’t know how to fear or welcome that consequence, but having made my decision, duty took over, and I prepared both for Ansei’s love, and his dying rite.

The day prior, Ansei had filled several pots with water from the cold stream. I poured the cool liquid out into a small bathing basin. The chill dimpled and flushed my flesh, but I could not feel the cold, so determined was I to follow through with my intention. In the remaining water, I washed the simple, unadorned shift I had slept in the night prior and wore it damp to hasten its drying. Then I went beyond the cave’s mouth in search of Ansei. He could not be very far away.

The sun was setting and the slight wind tugged and pulled, molding the damp fabric around me, chilling me on the outside, but the chill could not cut the heat rising from within me.

Shadows lengthened and the sun’s glare blinded. Then I passed into a grove of maples. A little distance inside, and I realized that the wood had once been a sort of garden to the cave dwellers. Now it grew wild, but someone had cultivated it once.

I ventured deeper within the wood and a breeze tickled my bare neck. Something about the azalea bushes carpeting the roots of the maples struck me with strange familiarity.

On entry, I had sensed Ansei’s nearness, but began to wonder if I was wrong. I saw and heard nothing of him. I pressed on, feeling increasingly vulnerable in my colder than naked skin. Then an overgrown bed of poppies caught my eye and I started.

I had been here before, but when? A step farther. I gasped and panned the grove, gazing from tree to tree. Delicately woven silk draped from the branches forming an elaborate tent!

I crept inside the maples, overlaid in silken webbing. Ansei had been at work. But such work! Deeper yet, giant, heavy webs spanned full trees, blocking the sunlight and turning the wood into one massive room of silken white tapestry.

As I turned around and around, staring upward in awe, I recalled to mind the vision I had dreamt while Ansei had treated my whip scarred neck with his pine salve. Point-of-view altered the images slightly, but I still recognized it. I had seen myself in this place years ago. In fact, my body had healed as I slept within this very canopy.

My dream had been in mid-summer with warm and balmy breezes, punctuated by a heavy thrumming of cicadas. A new blast of wind bit my skin, dimpling it all over. My chest tightened. The summer was well behind us now. The cicada’s urgency to find their mates had faded and passed. The sensation of the season’s slipping past filled me with urgency.

Whatever prophecy the dream may have promised seemed far from inevitable now. Was I, after all, too late? I had delayed and delayed. Was my season behind me?

I searched on, lifting and parting thin shrouds of white webbed fibers, barely daring to speak Ansei’s name—to hear my voice’s rising desperation.

He couldn’t have been far. I would find him within this place, somewhere. If I couldn’t discover him, at last he would find me and couldn’t fail to understand my choice. Though outwardly calm, inside I was screaming.

It wasn’t until I peered upward that I saw it. There! Up in a tree, was a canopy of webbing—a kind of nest. He must be there! To get there, I would be forced to climb, but I thought I could. I reached down and gripped the seam of my slip and tore it open to my pelvis, fibers screaming as they split.

Then I cast my gaze upward for low branches upon which to pull myself upward. It took some time. Branches grabbed and pulled my hair and scraped my skin. Pinesap stained my slip. The struggle opened the seams of my gown further, almost to my navel, but I reached the nest.

I peered over and wondered as I took in the expanse and depth of the web. It was a massive feat of industry. A prodigious work of weeks, perhaps months, and surely more than one arachnid. I scanned for Ansei, awestruck by the enormity of this creation. I trained my eyes on a patch of flesh. There! On the far upper edge, I spied a hand and forearm only, but it must be him.

“Ansei!” I said, pulling myself up into the web, which bore my weight with surprising resilience. “Ansei,” I called, now screaming as I climbed toward him.

Then I stopped and stared dumb. His wrists were bound tightly with webbing fibers. He was caught!

I knelt down beside him and shook him.

“Ansei. Ansei!”

His eyes widened in recognition. “Furi.”

I gasped,” Who did this to you?”

“Nature has to regulate the species somehow,” he whispered. “And I am already past my time.”

His words smarted like judgment. I bent over him.

“You will not go like this.”

“Will you save me then?” He asked, one eye arched in deliberate irony.

“No,” I whispered, my voice breaking roughly over a tightened throat. “And, yes.”

He acknowledged me with a slow blink of his eyes.

“You’re here now. There’s no rush.”

I checked my haste, but every other restraint fell away with Ansei’s bindings.

You may think our spider sex a barbaric rite, and I will not recite those private details to you, but know that for us, we had only this once, and we sacrificed everything for it.