Arachnid: Flight After Deluge
The waters have risen; the signal has sounded in our skeletons of minimal composition. An instinct of age-old urgency has stirred our colonies into motion. Time has come for the next rung of survival, quest for the next habitable frontier – former field, farm, meadow, now stubble, debris, torched by man or ravaged by nature. It is up to us to mine this chapter deemed closed, we have known since times of Noah and before. Counting on the wind’s mercy, we will cast out spools of silk, arcs to fly upon when buffered by the wind. It is a leap into death for most, but still, as surely as we brave oblivion, cast we must, unquestioning, untroubled by the cursed chromosome of fear or regret, in blind obedience to an instinct from beyond the origin of time. We change the face of the world once our work has begun. These plains, we will coat with sheets of self-spun gossamer, leaving humans to search for words at the fringes of belief, unable to word their surprise without giving it sheen of symbol or sublime. Where we take flight, they see balloons and kites, where we land, it is always rain of a novel kind. Used to seeing us at the level of their feet, they are troubled when we take to the skies. If an ocean wind slaps us against a sail, the sailors run away in fright. A couple who drove to the forest to steal a first kiss froze is paralyzed when the car beams light up taffy trees like ghostly popsicles. As surely as we occupy, when the time is right, we relent, until the rhythm of nature beckons those next in line.