Horror and unimaginable fear wracked Talas’s mind and body. With such fear the thoughts physically caused Asha to wince and step back; You LOVE me because I am not food!!

Talas’s body continued to shiver and shake both in pain from the wound but more and deeper from the terror that faced him.

Slowly and tentatively Asha creeped physically closer to Talas as well as quietly crawled into his mind again between thoughts as a spider traversing a delicate web.

Talas, she began soothingly and softly, you showed me. I saw it in your mind. You want to find a mate and love her. You can love me. There is no one else here. Please, I want to know love.

Blankly Talas stared back at the creature with 6 eyes, 8 appendages, two antennae, and a fanged lipped mandible. To say she was arachnid would be wrong, arachnid like yes, but no abdomen like a crab but thin like a wasp not round. Looking at her was unsettling. Talas could not look away.

Asha gently pushed here and there on the optical centers of the mind, slowly she could see what pleased the eye of a human. Suddenly wincing at the hideousness she was to him she felt it through her being and let out a cry of true pain.

A low screech escaped her mouth of such sorrow, “Sccaaa….” Talas, you see me as this?!

She had been so proud of her shiny chitin, her glowing eyes, the gentle twitch of antennae for affection, to include her dancing gate of a hop skip from rock to rock. If her kind had tear ducts all eyes would have teared.  

Talas just watched petrified. Again, the same low screech then she ran off into the night to hunt. Leaving his mind to his own thoughts.

He shuddered as he heard her screaming as a banshee of earth folk, her voice fading as she continued into the night. He felt the children chewing at the corners of his mind. He forced himself into a fitful nightmare filled slumber.

Asha’s voice raspy and her small vocal cords ached from wailing for at least an hour as she ran jumping from cervices to crag she killed with abandon, becoming the monster that Talas saw her as. She killed mercilessly, throwing pieces and carcasses to the horizon, she kept none of it, the slithery things and diggy things can have the food tonight. The babies will be hungry, but she did not care. Maybe she will get caught by the Didon and finally die. She did not know how old she was, she could not remember being a hatchling. Only always with children, hunting, feeding, taking to the reaping. Her thoughts, dark and of her babies eating Talas stopped her cold. She hunched over, sobbing without the soothing release of tears. Just the raw pain in the middle of her body. A heart a poet might say. Feeling the pain and sting of rejection but not just rejection, repulsion. She lay on the ground sobbing and flailing with no tear to fall.