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They hadn't come to a decision that night, too caught up in their personal discussion.

A few weeks passed, and the flavor of his thoughts about the issued changed. Wing's advice about keeping the lovers concealed had brought to the fore one stray piece of speculation from a single source amid many other advising voices. Giving legal recognition to such pairings. That would be pretty much the opposite of what the doctor offered, yet it was also a different opposite from the original choice. He smiled inwardly at the irony.

Like so many times, politics worked in more than two dimensions.

More than once the spider had eagerly constructed visual webs. Clusters of opinions and rough numbers of factions. Maybe he should start with 3D modeling, too.

He realized belatedly that the spider never had given his actual opinion. Only a reason to leave them alone. He was a crafty one. The crafty one. The predator laced his fingers together, paws almost going into a kneading motion. Oh, he would coax it out of him, all right.

Sitting in the light blue room, the massive monster thought about how humans had recently taken up using blue for baby boys. Rather arbitrary. He much preferred monster's choice of green. His mind drifted to when he was a boy, playing with Wing and pinning the small spider while teasing him. Maybe if he had been nicer back then, he wouldn't be so wary of him now? But that was so long ago. He discarded the thought. That was just something all boys did. Surely it was just the manners speaking in the present.

"You're the only one keeping my ego in check, Sire," the spider had joked occasionally.

"I'm not sure I even accomplish that, all by myself," he said aloud to the ceiling. "You have no reason to feel inferior to me, Wing, though you always seem to anyway."

---

The next time they met up, he went straight to the point.

"What if I told you I had tried it?"

"Tried . . . being with a man?" He looked like a five-eyed deer in headlights.

"Yes."

"Your personal relationships are none of my business."

"Ah, come on, you don't speak to other men about-"

"No, but they do speak to me," the spider said sharply. "Even when I ask them not to."

Gorthorn furrowed his brow, confused by the sentiment behind the words. Wing was much more averse to this than he thought. "Well then, do you want to get back to the policy making, then?"

The spider glanced around the room. "I suppose. I don't know why you've brought this up with me, though, Sire. Typically I am more about logistics of resource distribution and business ethics. You usually leave me out of things that people can't be pretty rational about."

"Well, I'm sorry I've made you uncomfortable," the king replied.

"But, now that you've handed it to me," he flashed all six hands and the king chuckled, "I of course couldn't leave it alone. I thought about something. If you were to punish them, they would also be twice punished. Bringing attention to them would expose them to hatred."

"Ah." The king hadn't thought of it that way. "Well, it's a good thing I did ask you then, isn't it?"

The spider shrugged.

Gorthorn stroked his beard. "Are you advocating keeping quiet to keep them safe? Or to keep the status quo?"

The spider smirked. "Oh Sire, you are very quick on the draw."

"Ha. You think that more people would try it if it became a public issue."

"Yes, and, to be honest, it should be really obvious why I'm doing this."

The king nodded. He understood.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

"Alright." Now he smirked. "So, what do you think of my breaking the law?"

The normally poised man tripped over his words. "W-well, for one thing, royals are above the law regardless-" he worked his jaw, "and your father made the law, not you, so you're not technically a hypocrite- and you've lost an amazing woman," he quickly looked back up and down, "n-not- I mean to say- she's left you, you were a fine partner in my estimation-"

Gorthorn smiled sadly. He was trying so hard not to insult either of them.

"a-and after that, I wouldn't fault you for whatever you wanted to-"

"You're making excuses for me? Is that just because it's me? What do you really think?"

"Why are you doing this?" the spider cried suddenly. "I-I've said I don't want- t-to talk about this, a-and now you're, you're what, trying to get me to speak against you?" He shrank against himself.

"I'd like to know how you'd treat others if they told you they were breaking the law secretly."

"That's none of my business either!" the spider asserted heatedly. "If I don't want to know about your exploits, what makes you think I'd take the least stake in others'? I just want to be left alone about all of it, man, woman, whatever! That's all I've wanted since I was young, and I thought I'd found it with you," his voice petered out, barely audible by the last word.

Gorthorn rocked back and forth on his heels, considering. Once again he was bewildered by the odd stance. As well as how raised the normally calm doctor's voice was. Why did it upset him so much? "So, you think your partner is the only one you should converse with about it?"

"Yes. And even then it was . . . sometimes . . . irritating."

Both of the man's eyebrows raised at that. Irritating? Now he was beginning to see why she'd left-

He quickly cut off that thought. He didn't want to insult her or Wing, either. His friend was just strange. A good strange, he corrected. A strange that invented countless things, saw the world through a big perspective, could pound out verses-

Gorthorn stumbled through his next thoughts, ones that didn't have words. He remembered Wing latching onto him as a boy, the careful way he measured his every sentence of his own or else drank in the prince's every word raptly. He remembered his wife's hand on his as he watched Wing and his wife dance at balls. Arguing which was more light on their feet and agile. She favored Wing. He recalled the way spiders always seemed to treat it as a competition as much as an embrace.

He could barely imagine moving feet and coordinating six hands in different motions. Spiders were fascinating.

His wife's voice was in his ear and her breath on his neck, ruffling his fur ever so slightly.

And the only words that came to him were,

"They combat while they dance. I much prefer you leading." Her tone was deep and silken, speaking wordlessly of what they would be doing later that night.

When they had joined group dances where everyone had exchanged partners in a regular flow, he remembered dancing with the Duchess and not knowing precisely how to handle such a light partner. Yet being so intrigued by it. And again his brain was going in that same odd direction because there was a little part of him that- pouted?- over never dancing with Wing. He was closer to him than her, after all.

"I appreciate your feeling that you could confide this in me. But do you understand yet?" Wing's weariness brought him back to the present.

"Yes, I think." Gorthorn shook himself a little, though he didn't move.

---

The king strode with purpose through the palace. Usually he would stop by the green room just adjacent to his, but the well-worn mental image would do for now. He had moved none of the furniture since his son's death. The four poster bed wasn't even made. A few books rested up against a shelf, as if asking to be let back in like pets. Somehow, leaving the sofa cushions un-plumped made it seem as if he had only just popped out for a while, and he'd be back any moment to flatten them further. The king was vaguely aware that it was probably not a good idea to hold onto such thoughts, or feed them this way, but he could not bring himself to-

He breathed out a small gusher of flame in frustration. Maybe he had been close to considering it before his wife had left him, but now he clung all the harder to the remnants of past normalcy.

He arrived at the room that housed the reason for her abandonment.

Thorny vines wound in and out of crafted rings of wood sticking out of the main bulk of the door. Words in dragon tongue, a highly modified pidgin language of lions and humans, lined the top and bottom of the frame.

The reason for the mixture was that dragons had been strictly solitary up until the point where they had decided to take over the nascent civilizations of animals. They had no need for language if they never had to converse with anyone outside of mating. They had thought humans, setting themselves apart from animals, were quirky in their desire to form cities. However, when some animals began to follow suit, it was said they took notice. For whatever reasons, species of animals split into sapient and non-sapient. Some even believed that the powerful dragons were involved in this ascendance of consciousness, not merely reacting to it, though the causes were lost to time.

Most dragons easily took the animals' side when wars would break out, and animals begged them to stay on as protectors and rulers.

At first, they were reluctant, as being highly self-sufficient and punishing to those that dared disturb them was a hallmark of a respected dragon. But gradually, they took on the role.

The resulting language became more powerful in magic as dragons uttered it. Soon, they began forcing lions to give up words and make new ones, guarding the strength for themselves. They could sense when anyone invoked the wellspring of magic. Conversely, for humans, whom they did not have authority over, they changed the words enough so that it would not spill over into their wizards.

This door would only yield to him, because he was the only wood-wielding dragonkin there was.

He spoke several lines of his predecessors' conquering.

The wood shifted, pulling the rings in and the vines with them. The new configuration glowed, turning the wood slightly transparent and showing off the engulfed living material. With a loud creak they swung open.

At least twenty beings in the royal guard, at various points in the building, would sense the door's opening, and had he not scheduled a visit, they all would have come running at the first touch of magic anyone attempted. The room was so overflowing with power, that he made no one stand in front of it, for suspicion that they would continuously feed off of it and grow their own reserves.

He walked through the threshold.

Inside, huge jars made up of magically augmented wood and stone sat in neat rows. Anyone who was trained in identifying either would note that the grain in the wood and the volcanic flecks in the stone were arranged in starlike patterns, rather than following one direction. Both elements swirled around each other in place, like a glass marble.

He touched the wood gently with his dewclaw and last digit, and spun his wrist.

The jar's mouth fluidly snaked downward, as if air could pour down like a liquid.

It revealed a human soul.

"Will you forgive me tonight, I wonder?" Gorthorn asked it.

It flashed at him.

Apparently not.

"Then we'll do this the hard way."

His paw pads glowed yellow as he pulled on the disembodied life, wrenching it from its cocoon.

A screech sounded in his head. It appeared to reverberate off the walls, but he knew it was only a very well crafted illusion. The room was still silent.

He enveloped it with his magic, radiating as much emotional warmth as he could manage. But, it would not yield to him.

He did this three times a week, and each time he would come staggering out of the room, drained and badly needing to sleep.

In order to break the spell that kept them all trapped down here, an unimaginably powerful source of magic was needed. His wife had insisted that she could train up enough magic wielders to accomplish it, and that it wasn't necessary to reap the souls of hapless humans who wandered into the caves.

He disagreed. He didn't know how many souls he would need, but he thought this was the fastest way. They were in a race to see who would prevail.

He would never reap and confine his own peoples' souls. But, if luck smiled on him and provided him with his captor's species, who was he to turn away that generosity? Some of the souls even belonged to adventurers who thought it brave to go investigate to see if the legends were true. Then they wanted to prove their strength. He bared his teeth. He'd save those for last. He intended to use a much more forceful approach for them.

The Order of Bos Energies, to which both of the royals belonged, scouted new talent very carefully. To entrust anyone with its secrets was dangerous. Technically, if they trained everyone, they'd be seeing the light of day a lot sooner. But, putting strong magic in the hands of those who would abuse it would not be worth their freedom.

Both he and his wife were frequently disheveled by the weight of responsibility of both of their choices, and no longer tried to hide their states to their underlings. They had been worn down to the point where it just wasn't worth it anymore to appear limitless and strong.

He thought she was being reckless in expanding their ranks, while she abhorred his decision to reap and control souls.

And neither was budging an inch on their position.

---

The spider's five-eyed concern was nice to see the next morning.

"I have something extra to submit today," Wing said after they had gone over reports. He dug into one of the many pockets of his coat. Unlike his normal reports, these pieces of paper were creased, dog-eared and folded. "This is a tracking of crime since we've been down here. As well as civil disagreements. Look at the pattern."

Gorthorn examined all the dates and constructed an approximate graph as he went. Obviously the spider had plenty of faith in his ability to do so, because he had not bothered to connect the dots or draw a picture himself, though he did note clusters with circles and underlines. What emerged was not so much troubling or surprising, but he did kick himself for not noticing. Both types of conflict appeared to spike at a very regular time following human appearances.

He was seeing the mood swings of their civilization- the crash after the high. People were overjoyed to see another another soul added to his arsenal, but then dropped back into despair shortly afterwards when it was apparent it wasn't enough.

"Did you just . . . put this together yourself? Did you suspect it, or have you been monitoring everything and realized it?"

The spider clasped three pairs of hands together. "The former. I realized it a while ago. But it does not matter. I don't think there's much we can do about it anyway. Heaven knows we've tried to keep their hope up. I just got tired of sitting on it." He shrugged. "Funny, isn't it, that this fits into a logical framework even though it is an emotional topic? Much like you cannot predict the behavior of an individual, but economics can much of the time predict collective behavior. History does the opposite- takes patterns like these and then hypothesizes the causes."

This was the sort of thing the doctor did in his free time, Gorthorn marveled to himself.

Once again the spider had proven himself to be an apt observer.

Chapter 3: https://www.sofurry.com/view/1102549