Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 3 of 18

Thren found the fleshy trees on the third day. Their hexagonal leaves overlapped like green scales. A seed pod bulged at the base of each trunk. She cut a satchel of leaves, carried her root nest to a shaded clearing, and packed the core fresh. Here the beetles could feed on trees that grew faster than they ate. The plan should have held. It did not. On the fourth morning she counted her breeding stock and found gaps. The nest that held two hundred glowing beetles now held eighty. No eggshells. No corpses. Something had taken them whole. She circled the nest and found pale thread snagged on a root mouth, thin and strong, gathered in a small ball. She watched that night. A turquoise creature crept from the dark, sleek and low, eight legs folding over the roots. It pushed a straw-thin mouth into a root mouth and drew a beetle out. The green glow slid up the straw and went dark. The hunter fed slow and patient. By dawn it would empty her nest. Thren could not kill fast enough to save the stock. One spider tonight meant more tomorrow. She needed the creature gone, not dead. She thought about the thread. The hunter dragged silk everywhere it walked. It wanted a place to rest and spin. So she built it one. She wove a cone of the pale thread she'd gathered, wide at the base, a soft hollow at the top. She set it in a warm patch far from her nest and packed the bottom with a live beetle, its glow leaking through the silk. Bait and bed in one shape. She hoped the hunter preferred an easy meal it did not have to steal. The next night she watched from behind a trunk. The turquoise creature came. It passed the root nest. It found the glowing cone, circled it, and climbed inside. It ate the beetle. Then it stayed. It spun. By morning the cone hung heavy with fresh thread, and the spider slept in it, curled and still. Thren checked her breeding nest. Not one beetle gone overnight. The trap worked. She had not driven the hunter off. She had moved it, given it a home away from her stock and a reason to stay. She knelt by the silk cone and touched the new thread. It held her weight without tearing. Strong, fine, and the spider made more of it every night while it slept. She had come to the forest to protect her beetles. She left with something she had not planned for. A living machine that spun cable for a ship's frame, if she could feed it and breed it the way she'd bred the beetles. Her stock was safe. But now she had two colonies to keep alive, and the spider ate what she needed most.