The path bent, the trees around it lacing themselves together more and more tightly, until we were walking into a tunnel. It was lit with luminous fungus in shapes I had never seen before, dead men’s hands reaching out of the loam and strange, abstract blobs draping themselves over the branches. Graham stayed by my side, looking everywhere, eyes very wide, while Mandy stayed close behind us. Toni and David slowed down a bit, letting us catch up to them, so that we were walking as an almost-united front. Four humans and an alien, heading steadily toward the unknown.

Second stopped at a curtain of mossy green, spangled with tiny dots of bioluminescence.

// warn them not to scream // she said, and pulled the moss aside.

The largest spider I’d ever seen hung suspended in the middle of a waxen web, its many-faceted eyes glittering in the light cast by the fungus around it. It was the size of a fully grown bull, its abdomen huge and swollen with unimaginable ichor, its limbs ending in spikes that looked powerful enough to shear through a human being’s ribcage. There were little elements of its outline and carapace that didn’t quite match with what I would have expected from an Earth arachnid, but the overall form was so close to what I knew as “spider” that I couldn’t look past it.

“That,” said Mandy, in a hushed voice that spoke of swallowed screams and nightmares yet to come, “is a little bigger than my shoe.”

The spider spread its mandibles wide, venom oozing from their tips. They, like everything else about it, were green, the same green as my skin. It darkened and paled according to the delicate patterns on the spider’s carapace, covering the whole creature in a filigree of impossible elegance.

She was still so beautiful.

I stepped forward, passing Second, who did nothing to stop me, pulling my hand free of Graham’s without fully realizing that I was intending to do so. He let me go. He didn’t know why I was moving, but he was willing to trust me. That meant more than I could ever have explained, and reinforced, absolutely, my decision not to eat him.

“You’re still so beautiful,” I whispered, and touched my palm to the gleaming surface of First’s exoskeleton. She clacked her mandibles contentedly before beginning to comb her two front legs through my hair, delicately brushing out the tangles. It was a mother’s touch.

Of course it was. She was my mother.

“Is everyone else seeing this, or am I asleep?” asked Mandy. “Please say I’m asleep. It would be amazing if I were asleep. Can I be asleep?”

“Not asleep,” said Toni. “There’s a giant fucking spider right there, and it’s green, so it’s probably one of the asshole invaders, and not something we’re allowed to set on fire.”