It was smaller than the smallest of pebbles. It was round, spherical, and pristine white. It was inside an egg, and when the egg hatched, it stretched its tiny limbs to the surface. Its name—and it was a ‘he’—we would call a weaver.

The weaver flicked its limbs around. It pushed itself out of its egg. We could see it now. It had eight pointed legs, six black eyes, and a hungering desire to eat.

A specter was a dying giant—to our little weaver’s eyes. The giant sputtered into existence and out—its soul as old as sin. And when it fell, the earth rumbled angrily, and our weaver skittered away. It hurried off, cracking eggs and disturbing its waking sisters and brothers, and when it was far enough, it paused.

At this point in its infancy, our weaver’s soul had patterns: archaic patterns borne from its ancestors, passed down from generation to generation and now, unto him. It realized, with sudden intensity, that it could eat its brothers and sisters before they hatch. And so it did.

Time passed. The specter’s soul, or what remained of it, flickered and died and suffered wordlessly. It seeped out from its flesh and gaps between its armor, rising into the darkness above. The smell of its flesh and rotting carcass attracted maggots, insects, and in time, our weaver.

Our weaver stretched its meals across hours, then days, and when it reached the specter’s gaping chest, it feared the beating heart. A cool obsidian, reflective and powerful and alive and, somehow, fleshy. It inspected the heart from the distance, and when it looked up, it found a weaver on the other side.

Our weaver lacked the concept of kin; the weaver it was seeing was either prey or predator. Both neither made an attempt to attack or to run, so both waited for each other. It did not last long. Eventually, the other weaver approached ours, holding something in its mouth; a red, bloody meat, and dropped it on the ground. The weaver clicked its mandibles. Our weaver clicked back, bit the meat, and hastily backed off. It chittered happily. The other weaver looked satisfied, or at least, appeared to be. It ate the meat, looked at our weaver, and waited.

In a span of two seconds, our weaver’s soul evolved tremendously; it expanded itself to fill the void in its knowledge. It designated a new category to its kin: ally. It was too complicated for its infant brain, but enough that it considered this particular kin as something that was not a threat. The friendly weaver seemed satisfied, and seeped out its pheromones to our weaver.

It was female, it signaled, and it was looking for a partner.

Partner was not a foreign concept. It was old; older than our trees and our boulders and our mountains. It was older than civilization and our islands we recognized as continents. There were two possible reasons for this pheromone, but difficult to distinguish: one, she was looking to mate for reproduction, or two, she was looking for a partner to hunt together with, or both.

Our weaver was utterly confused. You can imagine how two equal, opposing decisions could paralyze us, much less three.

The friendly weaver was oblivious to our weaver’s predicament, and sprayed him pheromones every other second while 0she chittered and hopped left and right. She disrupted his thoughts, as little as they may be. She sprayed him again when he looked down at the heart. She sprayed him and followed him when he walked away. She sprayed him for every time he distanced himself and ignored her because, well, he did not know how to respond.

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A chilling wind cut across them and hissed in their skin, rattling their mandibles and forcing their bodies topple over, and our weaver found himself lashing back with a hiss and raised his limbs and made himself look bigger. Enough, he signaled.

The friendly weaver seemed surprised and mimicked his stance. She clicked her mandibles fiercely.

He clicked his.

Our weaver identified her as a threat. He attacked her with quick slashes, but the shell was smooth and hard so his limbs slipped, and his infant brain only realized this several iterations later. She was not much different, but she wounded his eye once, and employed different strategies that pierced his defense. She had fought before and it shows. She lunged into him with the force of eight legs and spread her mandibles on his head. She was about chomp on him, when their weight dragged them down to the heart and separated them.

The beats of the specter’s heart was slow, but alive, and luminescent. Its light reached up their limbs and touched their skin. Our weaver was exhausted. It did not know what to do with the new situation, so it raised its limbs in a feeble attempt to fight, and the ally-prey weaver did the same. They closed on each other.

Then, to the ally-prey weaver’s astonishment, our weaver stretched his webs and attacked with it, spraying sticky webs. The ally-prey weaver responded by mimicry, but her webs were thin, which reflected her diet up till now. She tried to close her distance but our weaver would not let her.

Our weaver’s soul expanded, minuscule from our perspective, but he had learned much from the battle, and that knowledge fired across his tiny brain, and it changed him.

She was covered in webs that hardened around her. She could barely move, while our weaver busied removing the webs from himself delightfully. He looked at her. She looked back. At this point, our weaver decided that she was a prey, and he was hungry. So he walked over to her, with every grace as worthy of a hunter, and raised his limbs in victory, two bloodless black limbs, shimmering from the heart’s light.

The prey-ally weaver responded in slow, mournful chitters.

Our weaver paused, then realized that savoring his victory was tastier, and there was a bit of better food around here anyhow. She could wait. He skittered around, then, after finding a safe spot near the prey-ally weaver to show his dominance, he munched on the heart, oblivious of what it was, or what it could do to him, or how it would affect his life and his entire future from here on out. A single bite was all it took; the bite of knowledge and insight and power.

The heart beats thundered across his body, made him shiver, made him think.The presence of darkness and of light, of enemy and ally, intensified into being, and pushed him to the female not-prey-ally weaver, and stood over her. He raised his limbs, and squirted a minuscule of a fraction of his pheromones. Now he understood the concept that the female weaver was trying to convey, for she was much smarter than him, even in her infancy.

He was a male, he signaled, and he wanted a partner.

The weaver sent her pheromones, as much as she did before, and it irritated him for how strong it was. He chittered angrily and hissed. She clicked her mandibles weakly while looking up to him in big, black eyes. This, he recognized, was a sign of obedience, and, not entirely unfamiliar to concept of hierarchy, he calmed down.

He slowly picked off his webs around her.

And, when he was done, the female weaver brushed and cleaned itself, and began to eat. One bite, while our weaver watched from the distance. He followed her soon, and unbeknownst to him, her first evolution had been much greater, and more powerful, and she savored the new intuition like sponge.

She crept close to our weaver. She waited until he noticed her, and when he did, she spat her pheromones and chittered and laughed. He raised his limbs and hissed in warning. He expected her to hiss in response, but the female weaver surprised him when she lowered her body, while looking up at him. It was a gesture of obedience. He lowered himself and began to eat.

She spat another pheromone.

This time, he chased her immediately around the heart.