“Once more a Webmaster,” he said aloud. The baleful howl of wind through the valley drowned out his words. Krek didn’t care. This moment was too precious to waste. He swung back and forth, relishing the sensations he had been denied for so long.

Krek turned about in the web and looked down the length of the green valley. Tiny springs kept the vegetation lush and green but did not provide the odious ponds and splashing rivers he so hated. The constant hum of insects on which to feed told Krek this was nothing short of paradise. But where were the mountain arachnids? What forced them to abandon such a fine domain?

Krek ran lightly along one of the traveling strands and found an anchor point on the far wall of the canyon. He dug talons into the rock face and walked off the web and toward the caves he had seen. As he neared the yawning shaft, the telltale vibrations increased. Spiders. Many of them.

He paused at the mouth of the cave, then clacked and chittered and shrilled out a greeting of the proper form. Krek didn’t expect an immediate reply. Such would be discourteous. Humans rushed everything so. One spoke, the other replied immediately. Spiders not only had the proper number of legs, they also knew how to conduct a polite conversation.

Twenty minutes later, a faint clacking echoed out of the cave.

Krek tried to figure out the dialect. The words jumbled and he had to puzzle out even that someone had responded to his polite inquiry about the valley.

“I am a Webmaster,” he said. “May I pay homage to another?”

“He’s dead,” came the response so fast that Krek took a step back in surprise. Such unseemly haste in a spider showed intense agitation.

“These are not unusual occurrences,” said Krek. “While I hope to enjoy a long life amid my hatchlings on the web runs, I, too, will die someday.”

“They murdered him. They set him on fire!”