In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Metamorphosis, or, Oatmeal Cookies

SBMS110

The next afternoon I found Cherie arguing with the baker, trying to win her over to the little filly's side on the Matter of Mean Old Stallions. The previous night's excitement had caused her little wager with the Spirit to expire without result, and I had intervened, telling the both of them that neither had a say in the education of the Company's apprentices, no more than I did. It was in the hooves of their respective knights, specifically the bed-ridden Throat Kicker's decision, and none of ours. Had Throat Kicker made this decision? Then the Matter was no such thing, but rather a fait accompli.

What spoiled foal has ever accepted a hard decision from one parent without appealing to the other? And half the Company seemed inclined to stand in loco parentis to the little thestral – she had ever so many options for appeal! And so here she was, pleading with Auntie Cup Cake.

"I have no idea what you think I can do about it, Cherie. If it were up to Obscured Blade, I think they'd sacrifice me to your blood-thirsty phantasm. I'm here on sufferance."

"The Princess wouldn't eat you, Miss Cake! Really, I think she likes you. She's always chirpy after we visit your dreams."

"As unsettling as that sounds, I still have to decline. You should be more charitable to that old stallion, he can't have that many years left to him, and every day he has to chase you about and herd you into class is a couple days he won't be able to spend with his loved ones." In a sotto voice, turned away from the foal, she muttered, "If the old goat has any."

"Anyways, Cherie, you need to understand, it's important to mind your elders, both those you like and those you don't like. The same way that you need to be good to people you don't understand, moreso than it is to be nice to those you know and love. It's not truly kindness if you only extended it to your own; you have to show empathy to the lowly, the confusing, and the alien, or it's just another type of tribalism. How will you ever deal with enemies other than to slaughter them all, if you can't extend compassion to them?"

The filly just looked confused.

"Oh, Celestia. I'm terrible at these sorts of stories. Let's see… how about Silken Weave and the taciturn stallion?"

Cherie shrugged, still confused but settling back to listen as Cup Cake hoofed her a plate of warm oatmeal cookies fresh from the oven.

"Can I have some of those, Cherie?" I asked from behind them, alerting them to my presence.

Cherie jerked, looking guilty. I grabbed a hoof-full and settled back to listen to the latest bit of Equestrian propaganda the baker had spun. Cup Cake rolled her eyes at me, and continued, returning to her preparation-table, apparently to slap together another batch of cookies for the oven.

"One sunny morning, Silken Weave woke to discover that she had become a giant, black spider at some point in the night. This was not immediately obvious to what had previously been a beautiful little unicorn filly, but she awoke feeling very peculiar, and having difficulty breathing she reached to brush away the blanket she was tangled beneath. What she saw was a horrible, hairy black leg grabbing at her blanket, and so she yanked to pull it out of the monster's grip! There was no resistance, and she virtually spun like a top upon the top of her bed as the blanket flew across the pretty little room.

"She looked down and down for the source of the monster that must have been in the bed with her, and all she could see was monster! Black legs everywhere, a carapace, and mandibles just on the edge of her vision! Oh, right, a carapace is sort of like barding, except it's part of you, and mandibles are a kind of jaw that open outwards instead of up and down. Perfectly normal for a spider, of course, but not the sort of thing a young filly expects to find hovering just below her nose where lips and teeth and a jaw ought to be found if all were right with the world.

"She screamed, of course, or tried to scream. It turns out that spiders can't really make noise, aside from a certain alarmed hissing, which Silken Weave hadn't yet figured out the mechanism for. So instead, she contorted in a full-body rictus, and emitted a spray of alarmed pheromones. Pheromones, dear, are the chemicals that various beasties emit, to communicate among themselves. Primarily spiders and insects. My source informed me that this is the main way that spiders talk to each other.

"Silken Weave's incoherent stinking brought a response from the upper left corner of her bedroom, where a fat, somewhat elderly little spider lurked in her web, happily sleeping off a week's worth of flies and other pests caught in that sturdy web. 'Really, child, can you not make so much smell so early in the morning? Day is for sleeping, and hiding, and keeping ponies from noticing that you're lurking around their stuff.'

"Six of Silken Weave's new eyes pivoted upwards, and she squirted, slightly more intelligibly, 'You understand I what smells why I understand stink?'

"'Yes, dearie, very clever, you've figured out how to make words. Maybe later today we can work on syntax. I waited all night for you to wake up, and now that it's morning, you decide to start scuttling about. I knew it would be a headache when one of my ponies decided to grow some chitin.'

"Just about then, Silken Weave's doting aunt opened her bedroom door, to chase her out of her bed and get her started on her day. The former filly and her alarmed aunt stared at each other, and then screamed at the top of their lungs at each other. Well, the aunt did, Silken just went into another spasm, which unfortunately involved two of her fore-legs raising up in a fashion that the aunt took to be threatening. She galloped away in a panic, screaming as her hooves beat out a tattoo of retreat.

"'Well,' said the fat little spider, 'Nothing good will come of that. If I were you, I'd find a nice, dark corner under a solid piece of furniture, one they're not likely to think to sweep under now that they're all excited.' She looked over the much, much larger spider which had once been a spoiled little filly. 'Maybe we should get you outside instead. I don't think you'll fit under the dressers.'

"The aunt returned with a posse of ponies from the shop, her journeymare and two apprentices, all of them swinging brooms. Silken Weave was impressed, she didn't think the household held so many brooms with all of their bristles intact. Then she was scampering as fast as her many little legs could carry her, as the room filled with broom-handles and bristles knocking her stuff off of cabinet tops and side-tables and in general making a tartarus of a mess. The little spider flung herself towards the doorway, neatly landing on the shoulder of the fleeing Silken Weave as she skittered between the legs of the slower of the two apprentices, and fled into the hall.

"Silken escaped the house with a skirt of dust and webbing trailing behind her, having lost a little bit of sphincter control in all of her panic and fear. The little spider looked down at the mess dragging behind the two of them, and said, 'OK, no, stop, that's just shameful. You can't go out into the world like that. There, squeeze there. Yeah, and then pinch that. And that's how you cut your silk. See? I bet you feel pounds lighter now.'

"The big black spider who had just yesterday been a little filly started scuttling again, feeling the eyes of the town upon her. She looked back and forth, and realized it was a different village when you weren't the sweetest, prettiest foal in three districts, all white horn and fluffy mane and perfect coat. It was actually a pretty intimidating place when you were a big spider, especially when the doors and windows started slamming shut on either side of the road as she skittered further away from her former home.

"'I know what to do, my school-teacher will help me! He's ever so wise, and clever. The Princess herself sent him here to maintain the wards, and teach us foals so that we can take it over when he goes! Do you think it was some failure of the wards that made me like this?' she asked the little spider on her shoulder.

"'What do I know? I'm a spider. We know webs, and bugs, and making more spiders. Speaking of which, Maker knows what kind of bug you're built for eating, but we probably ought to start thinking about feeding you. I don't know when you're gonna start feeling hungry, but as big as you are, it's gonna hit you hard.'

"Silken Weave arrived before the little schoolhouse, long before anypony was due for classes. She looked around, trying to figure out where her schoolteacher might be. Some few heads were poking out of houses up the lane as they looked about, having come to the realization that the one big black spider, however scary and terrifying, perhaps was not the vanguard of an invasion of giant pony-eating spiders. It was an easy mistake to make there on the edge of the dark forests, which occasionally spat out such plagues upon the sunlit lands. The schoolteacher lived in a little attached apartment next to the schoolhouse, and he appeared at this point, quivering and waving a yardstick at the little monster.

"For two truths were hiding there in the open lane before the closed schoolhouse. The first was that although Silken Weave was very, very large as spiders go, as dark-forest monsters went, she was strictly a midget, no bigger than the filly she had been. And the second truth which had been well-hidden until this day was that her schoolteacher was a terrible coward, and a failure, who had been flunked out of the Princess's school and sent off to make something of himself in the benighted hinterlands. So confronting each other on this little stage was a tiny, scared monster, and a terrified, inept would-be monster hunter.

"Silken Weave raised one leg in entreaty to her school-teacher. He took this as threatening, and flung his yardstick at her like a javelin. He came nowhere near her, of course, but this attack caused her to leap away in reflex. She discovered in doing so that she could jump an amazingly long distance, easily ten yards – so far in fact that she almost bounced off the roof of the schoolhouse, and she quickly skittered up the shingles by mere spider-instinct, clambering up to the top of the gable over the entranceway before she thought twice about it, pausing only to peer anxiously down at the schoolteacher.

"'He's going to figure out where you went in a moment, hatchling. Best you don't have your mandibles poking out into the open like that. Try hiding around the back of this building,' suggested the little spider, who was now in the midst of the highlight of her little arachnid life. Even spiders occasionally feel the draw of the open road and adventure, and this was certainly shaping up to be an adventure she could tell her own hatchlings.

"Silken Weave followed her new friend's advice, and scurried to the back of the roof, where nopony could see her, or smell her sad little sobbings. The little spider tried to cheer her up by talking her through how to intentionally spin silk, and eventually got her to spin a parachute, to catch the rising breeze and take them off that roof. Just in time, in fact, as the local pegasi had taken notice of the disturbance, and were searching the neighboring rooflines for the little monster.

"The breeze took Silk Weave and her companion away in the direction of a sprawling farmstead along the verge between the dark forests and the open farmlands west of town. She landed in an isolated copse along a corn-field far from the farm-house, and the little spider showed her how to weave little traps for the vermin that scurried about in the field. Because Silk Weave was now very, very hungry, and getting desperate. And ponies might live on apple danishes and oatmeal cookies and daffodils, but giant spiders require something a little less vegetative, and voles and mice and the occasional budgie fit the bill.

"You'd think that a former filly would have taken longer to take to a meat diet, but the body finds its own rhythms, and hunger has a logic all its own. She soon found herself draining captured rodents dry like you'd drink down a glass of milk.

"They wove a little nest in the hollow of a tree, displacing an angry badger in the process. It was a little big and aggressive to eat, but by that point, Silken Weave was certainly thinking about such things. And she was growing fast.

"As fall and the harvest of her field quickly approached, her growth became a worry. Her little friend had nested herself, and laid her eggs, who had hatched, and the big nest was surrounded by little nests and little webs. They took the invertebrates – those are the bugs and such - and Silken Weave took the little mammals and the dumber birds. She was a little sad when the fat little spider passed away, but the spider's nestlings kept her company.

"One morning, as Silken Weave was wrapping up a nice juicy groundhog, she heard a squeal, and looked down to find a terrified fieldhand staring up at her tree. The earth-pony scampered off, and that was that. She thought about fleeing into the forest, but really, she was getting kind of tired of running.

"She waited for the response, expecting torches and mobs. Instead, it was a single old stallion, terribly scarred, and with just one eye. Silken Weave didn't have the experience to recognize it, but she was looking down at an old veteran, who in his day had been a terror to the griffins.

"'So you're what's been keeping the vermin from ruining my field here? Most years I mostly have to write off these acres, it's just too close to the forest, and that buncha trees. I've thought of cutting 'em down, but they say it's bad luck to cut down clean trees, and those are as clean as they come, I had the mages go over 'em with a fine tooth. Protects the water table for the rest of the farm, too. So, I seed this back twenty, and hope for the best, but expect the worst. Are you the best or the worst, bug?'

"If spiders could go wide-eyed, Silken Weave certainly would have done so. Somepony was talking to her, instead of screaming! She raised her forelegs in her best approximation of a pony shrug, and then raised one leg, than the other on the front quadrant.

"'Hrm, are you doing something to distract me from another spider sneaking up on me, or are you trying to communicate?' The old war-pony looked behind himself, and didn't spot anything, then turned around once. 'One for yes, two for no?'

"Silken Weave responded with one leg raised. They sort-of communicated, at least insofar as one pony talking and one spider saying yes or no could be considered communication. They promised to leave each other be, and life went on. The fields were harvested, and the yields were impressive. Silken Weave found herself ranging further and further as winter came on, and after the first snows, the scarred farmer came by and invited her to stay inside one of his barns, one where the cats wouldn't go, and was getting overrun by vermin.

"She wintered in that barn, and played barn-cat for her host. Silken Weave left a lot of used spider-silk laying about, and eventually the field-hands complained to the farmer about it. He said something to Silken, and Silken helpfully cleaned up after herself, laying out the used silk in nice, orderly bundles once she was done cleaning them. The old farmer looked at those ropes of silk harder than steel, and his one eye widened in astonishment.

"And that is how Silken Weave and Hard Bitten invented spider-silk thread, which became a mainstay of Equestrian barding, as well as some amazing construction materials, but as for how they figured out how to use that silk, and how Silken Weave left her talents to posterity - that's another story."

Cherie scrunched her face at the baker as they worked at a third batch of cookie-dough. "But what's the moral of the story? I don't really understand."

The baker sighed. "Oh, I said I wasn't good at kindness stories. I suppose you could say, it's supposed to mean that you should take ponies as they come, and don't expect the worst of anything strange you come across? We put too much on appearances, and the familiar. I don't know, filly. Just give your old Uncle a chance. Worst comes to worse, you're much younger, and you'll probably outlive him."

Author's Note:

I almost made Hard Bitten a pig farmer, and turned it into a nasty Charlotte's Web parody, but those versions kept ending up with the foals squealing about horrid pig-eating spider-monsters, and the Company sacrificing the crazy baker to their mad alicorn-ghost. At one point I thought about scrapping it all and writing a "Bad End" side-story to get it out of my head, but I couldn't come up with a decent replacement. So, instead, this.

Comments

[ponygrad]

I need to use more latin in my day to day life. But I'm worried people will think in loco parentis is just an insult calling them crazy.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

"As unsettling as that sounds, I still have to decline. You should be more charitable to that old stallion, he can't have that many years left to him, and every day he has to chase you about and herd you into class is a couple days he won't be able to spend with his loved ones." In a sotto voice, turned away from the foal, she muttered, "If the old goat has any."

Mark Twain's famous comment "It's hard to find the good in some people & harder when there isn't any"

[Skulljack17]

The notion of the story is true enough. You'll encounter folks that will treat you well, and those that won't. Best not to mind those that treat you poorly if you can avoid them, as you are able. It doesn't include the prospect of a situation where you have to put up with some folks that are unpleasant towards you, like your job or the like, but if you can choose to be around good folks you should do that instead. A simple moral, but it is a children's tale and doesn't make it less true.