Chapter 34: The Sparrow and the Spiders

Violet followed the beast around the next corner and suddenly found herself faced by a grove of pale, slender trees, their branches adorned with vivid clusters of tiny pink flowers.

Petals lay upon the ground in drifts, but where the path was clear Violet could see swells of moss rising to kiss the tree roots, studded with pale, button shaped mushrooms.

The trees themselves were small and strangely shaped, branches curved into helixes or conjoined loops. She could hear bees humming busily from place to place and saw that again the beast had attracted a cloud of golden butterflies. It seemed oblivious to their attentions.

Violet drew to a halt, momentarily overwhelmed.

“Was this what you wanted to show me?” She asked the beast.

The beast shook its head, though when it resumed movement its pace was much slower. It wanted to give her time to see everything.

The grove was flanked by two very tall buildings, and even through the clouds Violet could see the sunlight reflecting palely from their glass fronting, lighting the trees with a soft, shadowless glare.

“What are these?” Violet asked, looking to the cat as it came up alongside her.

“Cherry trees.” Her companion answered, tail swishing through the petals.

Violet immediately felt a curious nostalgia. On some long ago birthday, when she’d been very small, her mother had presented her with a can of sweet red syrup and crimson fruit more vividly bright than anything in the world.

Maraschino cherries, her mother had explained, putting great care into correctly pronouncing the first word…which nonetheless remained entirely unknowable to Violet. The cherries had been very sweet and exceptionally sticky, to the point that her mouth had glued itself shut after only two or three. Her mother had put the can away at that point and Violet could call up hazy recollections of the remaining cherries being doled out as evening treats for weeks afterward.

The memory put a sad hollowness into the bottom of her stomach and she quickly batted it aside in favor of surveying the nearest trees, seeking out clusters of ruby red fruit. But though she could see blossoms, and smell the sweetness of their perfume, Violet spotted no cherries. She stepped back, feeling disappointed and a little bit dizzy.

The whole grove smelled overpoweringly sweet, but at the same time there existed a strange, sour undertone of decay. It reminded Violet a bit of how the signal-box had smelled, though with none of the weird ozone scent accompanying.

Next to her, the cat yawned and glanced around itself, ears twitching. A gentle breeze blew down the street and through the trees, ruffling the flowers and swaying the branches. Ahead of her, between the blossoms, Violet saw a curious distortion tug at the integrity of the sky and realized she was observing the translucence of a strand of silk that ran between two neighboring trees, a few meters off the ground.

It shimmered, alive with a steady flow of spiders, all going about their business.

Violet had never seen spiders work in conjunction before and couldn’t help but edge closer to examine the process in more detail. Each arachnid was small, barely the size of a coin, but their abdomens were flat and pronounced, shaped in a way that suggested the curl of a cherry petal.

They were laying down silk, carefully braiding threads of material in order to strengthen the original strand. When Violet looked to other trees and examined the air between them, it practically glowed with interlocking bridges and shortcuts, an entire arachnid transportation system spanning the entirety of the grove.

It wasn’t a web, the pattern was far too loose, and wherever she looked the whole system was crawling with movement. There was simply no room for prey to land.

Again she looked to the blossoms closest, squinting hard, and was unsurprised to see that some of the petals were in fact nothing of the sort. Spiders crouched with their abdomens thrust up to simulate a part of their hiding place, awaiting bees or butterflies or whatever else decided to visit.

A hum layered the air, just past the point of regular hearing. Violet shook herself away from it. The spiders were connected in a way that she did not fully understand, and though a part of her was curious, she decided right away that whatever the focal point was, whether a queen or merely the paradox of solipsistic imitation…she did not wish to see it.

“They’re taking votes.” The cat said, as though it had sensed her reluctance to engage.

“…Votes?” Violet asked, confused.

“Spiders don’t have queens, or much of an established hierarchy,” the cat explained. “Everyone is capable of producing their own offspring, yet there exists no concept of family or kinship, so no divisions arise from bloodlines or any of that junk. At the same time, though these spiders are often perfect strangers, they do not compete with or kill one another.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a recognition of the common good, everyone working together for the benefit of all. It’s a bit too collective, in my opinion, but at least here nobody’s forced into it. Spiders leave all the time to strike out on their own, yet the vast majority march on and on.”

Violet considered this for a moment, then looked again to the busy streams of arachnids moving back and forth from errand to errand. Some were carrying bees, or parts of them. Others were simply laying silk, content within their own task. The votes, whatever they were, had to be layered, centered around an endless distribution of labor in order to maintain and expand their hold over the grove.

“Right now it’s all votes on construction,” the cat noted. “I think they’ve put together that it’s going to rain soon.”

Violet looked up to the sky, which seemed no different than before; pale and cloudy and vaguely threatening. She felt no preliminary droplets.

“What about the spiders that lose a vote?” She asked. “Do they still go along with it?”

“Of course,” the cat said. “After all, if they win the next vote they’d appreciate if their opponents cooperated. Basic democratic principles.”

“Hmm.”

“Votes on building bridges, votes on stabilizing infrastructure….” The cat’s ears had begun to droop. It was clearly tiring of arachnid parliamentarianism. “And…now they’re voting on whether or not to come down out of the trees and eat us alive. I think whoever proposed this is about to get a mandate.”

Her companion’s tone was light and unworried. Violet rolled her eyes, ready to put the remark aside as a macabre joke.

Then she saw the bird.

It was a brown sparrow, nestled into the moss at the base of a nearby tree. Violet’s first thought was that it was hunting for seeds or insects, but the bird before her did not move or react even slightly to her presence.

It was not false, Violet could not see any fungal tendrils extending past the sparrow’s feathers, nor were its eyes so blank and empty. A spider crawled across the length of its beak. Again the sparrow did not react.

Slowly, Violet’s gaze drifted to the verdant and lumpy blanket of moss that grew so thickly against the roots of the cherry trees, and the scent of decay became ever stronger. If she were to push her fingers through the moss and into that which the plants were feeding on, she knew somehow that she would touch upon bones and flesh that was no longer living. She would find tree roots and spiders yet unhatched, gathered into clutches and broods of pale, gelatinous eggs.

All of that lying in peaceful, lightless layers extending deep beneath the earth.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

The sparrow had been bitten and was now paralyzed. Yet somehow there was no fear, no blankness either, an existent vitality still lingered beneath the numbness of whatever the spiders had done to keep it from flying away, but Violet could detect no terror or unease. The possibility of wrongness seemed to have been erased from the sparrow’s immediate comprehension.

Focusing hard, Violet tried to push through all of that, into where the sparrow lay dormant within its own self. She tried to grab and jolt and scare, anything to rouse the poor bird from its languid rest; but though she could sense hints and flickery, ephemeral edges of a consciousness, the path of her progress was bizarrely cyclical and could not be completed. It reminded her of how she’d felt upon entering the revolving door in front of the cinema, her path fundamentally altered, there and close, then returned abruptly to where she’d started from.

“What are you doing?” The cat asked.

Violet shook her head as the world fell back into place. The sweetness of the cherry grove suddenly seemed nauseating. Her head hurt even worse.

“Isn’t there something we can do to help it?” She asked.

The cat gave her a bemused look. There was a spider atop its head, which it sent flying with an expert flick of one ear.

“That would be a little unfair to the spiders, don’t you think?”

“But….” Violet became suddenly aware that she really had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said before. The cat’s perspective on the matter would remain alien to her, and hers naive to it. “We can’t just….” Again her words fractured.

The cat sighed, almost sympathetically.

“What would you even do with that thing?” It asked. “Spiders or no, it’s already dying.”

“I’d pick it up, and take it somewhere peaceful.” Violet mumbled. Her shoulders had gone hunched and her posture was stiff. She’d begun to tremble.

The cat gave the cherry grove a cursory glance.

“This wouldn’t be such a bad death,” it said, untroubled. “Quiet. Surrounded by blossoms and just a scattering of tastefully muted sunlight….”

“Eaten alive.”

“Not that you’d feel it,” the cat countered. “Of course, if we’re arguing methods of death, what makes you think you have the right to intervene?”

The question was put forth with genuine interest, but at the same time felt so painfully self apparent that Violet could scarcely imagine an answer that wouldn’t come out as a shriek. Could the cat not see the spiders? Their endless glistening mandibles?

“Because what’s about to happen is bad.” She said, with all the patience she could muster.

“Okay….” The cat allowed. “Let’s say you take the sparrow and lay it in a bed of daisies until its heart stops. Is that all you’d do? I mean, the ants and worms would come and pick it apart at that point, so the end result would be the same no matter what. In my opinion you ought to fight off post mortem decay and desecration by sealing your bird friend into a glass box until a sparrow prince can happen by and kiss it back to life.”

Violet colored. The cat’s tone had descended nearly into outright mockery.

“That’s…not what I was saying, and you know it.” She protested.

“I couldn’t resist. Hyperbole is the best debate tactic in the world.”

Violet, who had only a hazy notion of what hyperbole even was, stared unhappily at her companion, who reluctantly drifted back to the subject at hand.

“We are in amongst nature now,” said the cat. “Which brings with it situations like this one, with outcomes you cannot change. Besides, it could always be worse.”

“That’s not an argument,” Violet muttered. “That’s an apology for the way things are.”

The cat laughed.

“There are certain species of ground wasp that prey upon spiders,” it noted after a moment, eyes drifting elsewhere as though seeking out a handy example. “But, they don’t eat the spiders themselves. Instead, they paralyze their prey, lay their eggs inside of its thorax, and when those eggs hatch into wasp larva, they eat the spider while it’s still alive. This sort of thing, with the bird, it happens all the time. These spiders are at least kind enough to provide anesthetic.”

Violet swallowed down her horror, just barely.

“That doesn’t make it any better,” she said stiffly, then felt a flash of inspiration. “If…if we were around when this whole city was shiny and new then you could use it to excuse all sorts of things humans were doing back then.”

“I’m not excusing anything,” the cat said, unruffled. “Just acknowledging the apparent permanence of this very natural feature of the world, which I cannot do anything to change.”

Violet said nothing. After a moment the cat sighed and found its way atop her rucksack, tail winding gently beneath her chin.

“I’m not saying you can’t feel bad,” her companion continued. “If you completely set your empathy aside you’d be more monster than girl. What I am saying is that you ought to know what to use it for, in the same way you regulate your fear. No useless fear, no useless empathy.”

Sighing, Violet shrugged the cat’s tail out from under her chin.

“What if it was you?” She asked.

“If it were me….” The cat mused. “I don’t think I could answer that, seeing as how I’d be flying high atop a cloud of paralytic spider venom.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’d want to congratulate whoever or whatever took me down, provided my lungs remained unpierced. But….” The cat suddenly shed its levity, voice growing newly serious. “If I am ever taken by something, Violet, I want you to run as fast as you possibly can in the opposite direction.”

“No!” Violet cried, the response immediate and instinctive.

“Surely you remember the thesis of this discussion,” her companion said. “…Things you cannot change. If something were to leap from the treetops and crunch me in its jaws I would not want you to die as well, at least not if it could be avoided. Besides, if you tried to fight something that could kill me, you would be so completely outclassed it wouldn’t even be worth it to discuss your odds. Do not attempt to rescue me if something happens.”

The cat’s voice was firm enough that Violet knew better than to press the issue any further. Still, a simmering discontent lingered within her.

“What if it were me?” She asked.

The cat’s weight disappeared from between her shoulders and a moment later it was in front of her again, expression unreadable.

“…You don’t want to know the answer to that question.” Her companion said, then turned and was walking unhurriedly towards the end of the grove, where the beast looked to be patiently waiting amidst its cloud of butterflies.

Violet stared down at the sparrow once more, and the businesslike procession of spiders preparing to devour their prey. It would be simple enough to brush them aside and grab the sparrow, but even as she reached out to do just that, Violet recalled how distant the bird had been, well beyond any possibility of outside contact, or sensation, or…anything.

The sparrow would be no more aware of her rescuing it than it would be of the spiders stripping its feathers and flesh. And while the thought of such a thing occurring remained just as viscerally horrible as ever, the idea of preventing it suddenly seemed uniquely, profoundly useless.

Violet let her hand drop, then took a tiny step back. There were words she could say to sum up the situation, bad ones, but in the end she simply turned away.

As she approached the far edge of the cherry grove, ducking beneath the sagging silken arc of a spider bridge, Violet noticed a change to the overall routine, a sudden arachnid unhappiness that she did not care to identify the source of.

Then she was past the cherry blossoms and in amongst her companions once again. The beast drifted closer, still swathed in insects. A golden butterfly skittered awkwardly against the tip of Violet’s nose before regaining a more coherent path.

She sneezed.

a r e -- y o u -- o k a y ? ---- The beast asked, tone low and gentle.

Violet nodded listlessly.

The cat had set itself up atop a mossy postbox that still bore a few traces of blue paint. It looked to Violet’s empty hands but made no comment, gaze turning instead to the riot of butterflies surrounding the beast.

“Of all the breakfast options that could have come, why these?” It complained.

“Since when are you so picky?” Violet asked.

“Butterflies are bitter. It’s a defense mechanism, I think….” Her companion answered, increasingly distracted by the swirl of insects before it.

“You could go back into the grove and help the spiders eat that poor sparrow.” Violet said, more nastily than she’d intended.

The cat flashed her a small look. Violet’s shoulders slumped.

“Sorry.” She mumbled.

“It’s alright, you’ve just seen something traumatic.” The cat said. Its tail had set to swishing and there was a certain sleek tension coiling across the entire length of its body. Bitter or not, Violet suspected that a butterfly was going to be snagged in the very near future.

“…Were the spiders really voting on whether or not to eat us?” She asked.

“Mmhmm.” Confirmed the cat, which had dropped into a low, twitchy crouch.

Violet couldn’t help but glance anxiously back at the grove, but of course there were no spiders coming after her. They’d given up their plans the moment she’d cleared the trees.

The cat smiled at the look on her face.

“They were still reaching quorum when you left. We were fine.”

The next moment it leapt, front paws outstretched, and caught a large orange butterfly between them. The other insects scattered and the beast watched them go with a sigh, jaws clattering.

The cat devoured its catch with a single chomp, the ragged corner of one orange wing spiraling down the street, caught on the edges of a gentle breeze.

“Dreadful.” It pronounced with a grimace.

Violet had never seen anyone be both prideful and disgusted at the same time.

“You knew it was gonna be bad, so why do it?” She asked.

“Because it was there,” her companion said, as though that should have been self evident, then turned its attention to the beast. “So, shall we go see this marvelous old artifact you want to show off?”

The beast looked away from where its butterflies weren’t and nodded, newly energized.

f o l l o w -- m e ---- It said again, and continued up the street.