He went to beg with them and realized that he had no way to say “please” or to entreat. The talk of spiders lacked the concept. Where humans lived lives of confusing feelings that might be swayed back and forth with mere words, his true people valued reason and evidence. Where the spiders felt, they felt with all their bodies: fear, anger, familial loyalty, these were not things to be toyed with by clever argument.

I have seen these Men kill many, many of us with their fire and light and metal claws, he hammered out on the threads. They hate us. They will use any excuse to kill us. They took me and changed my form into theirs to make me their follower. But I am not… I am not… I am… and his legs were trembling and he could not speak.

You are of them, the spiders within the cave told him implacably.

And at the last what could he say, but: I do not want this. I do not want to be a Man. I remember when I was of you and life made sense. But I cannot change what I am now. And you are half-right. I am not of them yet I am not of you. But I am of them enough to know them, and of you enough to know you also. And I am of them enough that I can ask them not to burn you from your home, if you will leave them be. But if you fight them, they will kill you. They will kill your hunters and your broodlings, they will destroy your eggs, and they will kill your Mother. Fight them, and they will leave nothing of you but ash. These things I have seen: their power and their hatred of us. Of you. Of us. But also if they tell me they will not fight, save if they are attacked, then I know this to be true also.

Nth was trembling, still, trying to put his message across so hard that it was almost lost in the twanging echo. I cannot stop them from entering these caves. I can hold them back from harming you. But only if you stay out of their path.

He had spoken all he could, and now he just crouched by the cave mouth, feeling odd vibrations as those within debated fiercely. He imagined their Mother, who must have dwelled here as unchallenged sovereign for many generations, now being asked to stand aside. How would his own Mother have reacted, if this band of heroes had made such a demand of her before entering the forest? She would not have listened, certainly. To enter the lair of a spider could invite only one response. It was only the unprecedented devastation wreaked by Penthos and Dion that had forced her to the humiliating negotiations that the humans had opened with her.