I hadn’t expected so much panicked screaming. The spiders had orders not to attack any of the lizards, of course, but the lizards didn’t know that. As soon as the first spider had entered their little rock crack to start cutting away at the far wall, the whole family was roaring in their guttural, croaking way.

I hastily ordered them to stop. I didn’t know whether the constructs were able to hear, but better safe than sorry. A quick scan of the cave didn’t reveal any impending invasions, so for now I’d assume they hadn’t heard whether they could or not.

Though they had stopped screaming, the lizards weren’t any less üanicked for it. If they didn’t still have standing orders to stay in the cave and multiply, they would’ve likely turned to mist and darted out of there already. As it was, they had only turned to mist, allowing them to all huddle together in the same corner, one overlapping another. They separated before returning to corporal form, though. Not that they felt any safer now, the number of spiders in the crack was only increasing and so was their pulse, their mana reserves had simply run out. I’d have to do something about that before their little hearts exploded.

Ordering them to stop being afraid would likely be complicated. Both because I had never done anything like that before, and because I didn’t know how that would effect their behaviour. If I told them to stop being afraid of spiders, and they happened to come across a Spider I hadn’t given that order to, I didn’t want to be responsible for what followed. Besides, it simply felt wrong to manipulate their feelings like that.

In the end, I ordered the spiders to stop digging at that cave altogether. Instead, I ordered them to dig a new one a little further along the wall, leaving the lizards in their little crack until the warrens were large enough I could resettle them there without risk of having them run into spiders.

Speaking of, their new claws weren’t quite as good at tunnelling through rocks as the centipede’s ones had been, but whether that was due to the spiders being less adept at using them or some sort of defect in the way I had constructed them I didn’t know. Either way, the work was progressing quickly enough, and in between cutting out rock chunks and carrying them away, there was even enough time to hunt and lay more eggs.

The loose rocks were piled in a defensive ring around the entrance, secured there with spider silk. An incredibly useful material, that. I was still at a loss for why the spiders weren’t using it more, or even at all, without my explicit prompting. The silk wasn’t only useful for securing the chunks in place, it was also handy to carry them away in the first place. Lacking hands, the spiders could usually only carry a pebble at a time, but with the silk they could combine them into larger balls they could easily roll away.

So, the hole in the wall kept growing and growing. But it remained a hole. This was a problem with the way I gave orders to my spiders, I could only impart general impressions and vague directions. I could order them to dig into the wall, but there my ability ended. Keeping the entrance tight, expanding it into a tunnel and then later on into a cave, that was beyond my ability to convey or theirs to understand. I let the work halt for now while I thought about how to circumvent that problem.

When I had ordered my army to form a defensive line during the battle, that had worked flawlessly. But then, I had been able to send them an exact picture of how they would look lined up in those surroundings. Well, image was the wrong word. I still wasn’t able to see like I had used to. My vision was more like a memory of things I had seen. Or rather a memory of a place I had been, with a general concept in my mind of where things were. Colours, sounds, feelings and smells were simply information attached to those things, like how I knew from stories that the ocean was filled with the sound of waves, though I had never seen or heard either. And there they were again, fragments of memories slipped away before I could properly grasp them. It had become almost common enough I was able to ignore it by now.

But back to the orders. When I had commanded the spiders at the battle, I had been able to send them a general concept of where I expected them to be in relation to everything else, and then they went there. But with digging, that was another thing entirely, because I had done exactly that when I had given the order to dig out the cave. But after a while, they veered away from my instructions further and further. Even the defensive wall had grown more scattered as time went on.

I suspected that the instructions simply were too complex for them to hold in their minds, like when you told a mason the exact position of every stone in the wall they were supposed to build and then expecting them to keep it all in their head.

I’d have to find a way to give them instructions without them having to memorise the whole plan in advance. However, I also didn’t want to have to constantly hover about where they were working and constantly give new orders. I’d need to simplify things, make it something as easy to follow as forming a line at a specific point.

An image flashed through my mind, workers marking the outlines of a new temple wing in crushed chalk on cleared ground. As soon as it appeared, it was gone again, but the idea remained. If I could somehow make a permanent outline, I’d just have to tell my spiders to dig along the marks. The problem was that in order to make such an outline, I’d have to order my spiders to build it first, and that would run into the same problem. Also, the idea didn’t work for digging tunnels in the first place, since there was no way to lay an outline in solid rock without digging a tunnel for it first, which rather defeated the whole point.

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However, there was one thing I did have control over, and as it happened solid rock wasn’t much of an obstacle for it. My mana. If I could lay down some kind of markings using that, my spiders might be able to feel its presence and use that to guide their work.

I let my awareness drift into rock that was to become the lizard warren. It was thin and quickly grew thinner as the rock went on, but it was still dense enough to get a vague idea of what was there. Which wasn’t much besides rock and stone. But if it was enough to get a view, it’d be enough to lay down a simple working.

Concentrating my awareness on a rounded area, about as long as the span from my fingertips to my elbow if I had either, and half as broad, with a domed roof flowing into a flat floor. Once my awareness was focused on that space and nothing else, I began saturating it with mana as I had done when first breaking that crystal which now haunted my domain with its minions. Perhaps that was some kind of revenge, I idly thought.

Before anything could strain or break, however, I stopped. I willed the mana to stay where I had put it, and it did so. Then, I ordered them to thrum. The threads began vibrating, producing a low, quiet hum that reverberated through the rock. It would be more than enough for my spiders to perceive with the sensitive hairs on their legs.

From that humming sketch, I worked myself back to the main cave, painting a spiralling tunnel as I went along. I made sure to insert chokepoints and easily defensible curves as I went along, as well as sloping the tunnel downward so any defenders would have the high ground. Once I had reached open air again, or at least relatively open considering I was still who knew how deep underground, I sent out an order to my spiders to start digging out the thrumming rock.

Or at least the ones that still remained in the area. While I had been painting the first cave of the warrens, some had already wandered off in little packs, hunting as they would usually do. Getting them back together took about as long as sketching that cave had. I’d need to order them not to wander off again, especially with the raiding packs still out there. But that’d mean I’d have to send the food toward them, and since I was already doing the same for the lizards, the supply was getting tight. Not that there weren't enough plants to feed all the slugs and bugs sustaining my army, but I just couldn’t raise them quick enough to sustain two growing populations, especially considering the still marauding constructs.

Perhaps I could set aside a part of the warrens to raise those too, but then there was the problem that I could only concentrate on so many workings at once. Though perhaps there was a way to establish a permanent working covering the section I’d set aside for them. I had been able to contain the mana sketching out the cave in a location by simply willing it to be there, so maybe I could set up something similar with the growth quickening working, though that one consumed the mana I assigned it to. In that case, I might be able to channel a portion of the mana emanating from my core to that area to sustain it. I had seen the crystal do something similar as it fed on one of my creatures, the first one I had noticed it drag away into its domain, though in that case it had channelled the creature’s mana toward itself. Surely the opposite must be possible as well.

While I was thinking, the spiders had already dug out the tunnel and had started on the first chamber. As air and mana flowed into the space, my aura expanded deeper into the surrounding rock and I idly went to set up further orders. The warrens would be a spacious retreat for my lizard populations, once finished. A network of caves and tunnels of varying sizes, filled with lush vegetation and watering holes. Everything they would need to create a stable, healthy stock I could pull from for the war.

Inbetween painting in new chambers, I ordered some of the spiders to carry in soil and seeds from the outside and another group to carry the rubble out and pile it on top of the wall. For that, I set up a new set of orders with mana thrumming in slightly different tones. While that was happening, I moved the lizards out of their old rock crack and directed them into a dead-end pocket in the new warrens where no spiders would be bothering them.

With the lizards moved, I’d also have to set up a new food supply. The old way of simply sending a slug or two there every once in a while wouldn’t work for much longer. So, instead I went about creating a few trails of mana leading back to the warrens. The snails seemed to be able to follow them, even though I had no idea how that worked. They didn’t seem to have any ears, after all. Be that as it may, whenever one of them came across a trail, they would follow it into the warrens.

Returning my attention back to the cave, it seemed that much of the floor, at the one already dug out, was already covered in a thin layer of soil. Enough to start growing plants there. The working went into the back of my mind, alongside the one I still maintained on the lizards.

Now there was nothing left to do but watch. Watch the spiders dig the tunnels, watch the soil layer on the floor get higher and the plants and lizards grow. The snails were slowly coming in as well, beginning to feed on the still-growing plants. I debated whether to do something about that, but then the first snail was quickly snapped up by a spider. That became a problem though. With three dozen hungry spiders who were only allowed to go out hunting if absolutely necessary, there were a lot of hungry mouths to feed. Too many to also feed the lizards. In the long-term, I’d be setting up a separate space in the warrens for snails to breed in, but for now I’d need to draw more in from the outside.

As my attention left the developing warren, I followed one of the lines drawing in snails from the outside. It’d be interesting to know how effective they were at drawing them in. However, instead of more snails, I found a cohort of constructs moving toward the warrens instead. It seemed my efforts had been noticed after all.