Like all glorious end-of-summer afternoons, I find my usual shady spot around the back of the barn, and nestle between a couple of barrels with a chunky tome containing a series of spells I’m not supposed to know exist. The emerald silk of my skirt blends in with the grass, so my white blouse makes it look like my torso sprouts from the ground, and the folds in my skirt spread out like spokes of a wheel (or rather more topically, like spindly legs). As this is my usual haunt, the younger childerlings in our little community all know exactly where to find me.

  “Avvy! Quick! We’ve stolen Elder Matrice’s lyre!”

  I look up from the book, ready to play along with their game of pretend. Then I see the lyre.

  “Oh, Ricky, why did you bring it to me?”

  “Play it for us! Pleeeaaaaseeee! We want to dance.”

  I do my best to put on a stern grimace at the half dozen cheeky grins in front of me. This does nothing to quell the pride in their eyes.

  “Elder Matrice will be very upset when she finds out what you’ve done.”

  One of the littler ones, Chilla, beams.

  “She wont be angry when she hears you play. No one can ever be angry when they hear you play, Avvy.”

  I shut my book, and let my mouth curl into a grin, just a little bit in the corner. The childerlings all cheer, and Ricky hands me the lyre.

  I should point out at this stage that to my people, a lyre is very different from those in other cultures. In most parts, a lyre is strung with all the strings set the same direction, with a sound board at one end and a suspended crossbar at the other. To my people, the Aranea, a lyre looks more like a drum, with a seemingly random series of interconnected and haphazard strings threaded through it like a confused spider has had its way inside. When you pluck any string, they all hum, but plucking in different places gives an array of delicate and elegant tones and sounds.

  Elder Matrice’s lyre is a masterwork. It feels light and bouncy in my hands, but I doubt I could break it with a sledgehammer. I expect she had spun the strings herself.

  I don’t have much time to admire it though, as we’re running across the courtyard to the bandstand. Isolated somewhat from the main cluster of buildings that make up our little village, it has an unobstructed view of the surrounding forest.

  A simple thing of local oak wood, it is sturdy, and painted in light colours. The acoustics, usually a benefit, project music across the village. We will be found easily enough here, but I hope the small distance will keep the fun alive a bit longer.

  Moments later, I flex and uncurl the fingers in my right hand, allowing an extra couple of joints to slip through from my other shape, and start plucking away. I stamp a beat into the well worn wooden floor as I play, and the childerlings cry and laugh and swing around each other as they dance. I can’t sing, but I start up the tunes to some of the learning rhymes and the little ones call out the words from the bottom of their bellies.

  A bell chime echoes through my mind. Someone has triggered our Alarm web, someone in the forest.

  All adults in our community are clued into our Alarm webwork. I’m not yet considered an adult, but it is possible to get early access to the privilege by eavesdropping on someone’s attunement ceremony, spending a couple of weeks unpicking your notes of what took place, and then attuning yourself in the dead of night, far from prying eyes.

  I miss a couple of notes, not that the childerlings seem to notice.

  A few seconds pass, where I almost dismiss the unsettling feeling that’s disarming my playing. Then my mother’s necklace vibrates. Like the Alarm, this is a warning of sorts. It means “incoming projectile”.

  My hands fly from the lyre, fingers dancing through specific movements. The instrument bounces safely on the wooden floor, making an elegant ding even when misused. I shake the different pools of mana inside of me gently but purposefully, and the mana overspills and combines. A blue incandescent mist spews from my fingertips, coalescing in less than a second as a broad barrier between the bandstand and the forest. An arrow strikes it, and I get knocked to the ground as the impact hits all of me evenly, instead of the tiny patch in front of my heart. Safe to say the party is over.

  Very slightly dazed, I pick myself up to my feet and look out at the clearing. A man has sprung himself from the forest and is sprinting towards us. He has no bow, meaning he has at least one companion, and they're holding ground in the forest - so, they can't be attacking us outright. There’s a strategy behind these details that our protocols haven’t considered. Something between a decision and an instinct takes over me, so I pull a pen knife from my pocket, and gesture to Ricky (he’s the only childer not panicking). He comes over, confused.

  “Trust me,” I say, and he does. I cut his palm, and take some of the blood onto the flat of the blade. With a significantly greater disturbance to my mana pools, I mutter to myself and flick some of the blood onto the floor by the entrance to the bandstand, which bubbles and grows up until in mere seconds, there is a double of Ricky standing dull (but lifelike) in the opening. The mental weight of maintaining the spell makes me groggy.

  Only moments to spare, as the man has now come around to the entryway. He grabs the dummy childer and holds a knife to its bloodless throat, instead of one of the real childerlings. Something inside me smirks. The triggered Alarm still chimes.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The man is dressed in shabby brown leathers that are pieced together with a coarse looking (but admittedly sturdy) thread. The unprotected parts of him are covered in a green cloth spotted with dark stains and shoddy patches. He doesn’t seem very elegant in the way he moves, but hostaging helpless childerlings doesn’t really call for much finesse. He also has a longsword strapped to his black belt, in case the childer gets mouthy, I assume. His greasy brown hair is speckled with grey, and he looks drawn and gaunt. In another situation I would immediately seek a hot meal for him.

  “Afternoon,” I find myself saying rather loudly.

  The man snarls, and shakes the dummy forward suggestively.

  “Keep yourself quiet, fiend, or the kid gets it.”

  I lower my voice somewhat.

  “What do you want?”

  Another chiming wracks my mind. An Elder, I know not which, has triggered the Alarm set in our village centre. All clear.

  No!

  “I already have it,” he says, and throws my dummy over his shoulder. Before I can react (I was going to laugh), he bolts. I turn to Ricky.

  “Run to town. Ring the bell by hand, no not that hand, and scream to high heaven that there’s one in the forest. GO!”

  I casually wander down the steps from the bandstand and, less casually, begin casting another spell as I make my way around.

  The man is about halfway across to the forest where his friend with the bow is waiting. I drop my concentration on realising the dummy childer, and the man stumbles as it falls to pieces in his arms, those pieces then dissipating into nothing. He turns back to me, dumbstruck.

  “So you steal one of us, what happens next?”

  The man roars and charges back towards me.

  “Stop,” I command, releasing the readied spell. He stops, sword drawn, a few feet from me. I’m not sure what the others in the forest might be doing right now, but I know my necklace will tell me if they let off another shot.

  I only have a few seconds where the charm will keep up its effect, so I slip partially into my other shape. A further set of eyes open on my temples, still human looking though a little small. Some of my teeth start fusing into two distinct mandibles, and the palms of my hands grow into spinnerets. At a casual glance, you might think I have a mouthful of food, and an apple in each hand.

  I suppress the inclination I feel to allow further limbs to spawn, or for my head to retract into my chest, or my torso to rend into a thorax and abdomen. I work my spinnerets immediately, encasing the man in mere seconds in my own webbing. He hits the ground wriggling, but my web is far too strong. His face is not covered at all, a kindness on my part.

  A screech comes from the woods, and I notice a woman, bow over her shoulder, running towards us.

  “Leave him alone, you monster!”

  The effort of holding myself partially transformed means I have no presence of mind to fight the urge to snarl - I am called a monster by someone I have never met, who tried to shoot me from afar while I was playing music for childerlings to dance to.

  Moments later, she too is wrapped up in my webbing, laid next to her friend. I revert fully back to my human shape, and kneel next to them calmly, straightening my fine skirt. An Elder will be here soon, and I have never spoken to someone who was only human before.

  “You guys really hate us that much, huh.”

  “Child stealing scum,” the woman growls, and spits. It hits the back of her friend’s head, but I don’t mistake the gesture as aimed at anyone except me.

  “You think we steal children? Is that why you tried to kill me?”

  “Aranean monsters posed as good honest folk in our town, and stole our child from us,” the man said. “We’ve come to get him back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. We don’t steal children, your anger is in the wrong place.”

  “Ha!” the man snorts, “everyone knows Aranea are the ones who take them. You visit upon them foul magics until they are corrupted, like you.”

  “That seems convenient for the ones who actually want to steal your children,” I say, but they aren’t listening to me.

  “Where is your latest haul?” asks the woman. “At least let us see our son before you eat us.”

  “I'm afraid everyone here was born here,” I reply coolly. “In fact, I’ve assisted in several of the births recently. Did you know we have live offspring? Many assume we lay eggs. We are truly human. We are just truly other things as well.”

  I look up from my feet. A black, hairy spider the size of a pony has strolled out of the forest from where the Alarm was triggered. I make a mental check, and the faint thrum of tension confirms the spell has been reset. My two captives are facing the wrong way to see her, though.

  “What was the plan then? Capture a child and organise a swap for your own?”

  “Something like that,” the man grunts in admission.

  “Not too shabby. Pretty minimal bloodshed, apart from me.”

  “I wish it weren’t so,” the woman snarls, writhing uselessly within my webbing. “I wish we had the strength to wipe out this whole charade. Underground, they must be keeping them underground..”

  By the time Elder Matrice reaches us, she has assumed her own human form. From the colour of the spatters and burns down her sturdy linen dress (with cyan details), she had been attempting alchemy again when the Alarm went.

  We call her Elder, but it’s not because she is that old. Matrice is one of the best of us. The childerlings joke that as an infant her first words were the verbal component of a cantrip, and given her unwarranted proclivity for alchemical experiments, her first steps were in aid of leaving the scene of an explosion. It was from her personal library that I had, ah, “acquired” the spellbook I was trying to study when the childerlings interrupted me, having, ah, “acquired” her lyre. Maybe I should “acquire” her a locking spell as a gift next time the occasion arises.

  “Good afternoon Avarast. I hear these kind people have persuaded you to return my lyre?”

  I stand up and brush myself off.

  “Of course, Elder. Exactly that.”

  “Good. See that it is returned promptly, as well as the copy of Ezopius’s Journal. You’ve had it long enough to read through twice.”

  “I’ll see it done, Elder.”

  “Good. Wait in my library until I return. I shan’t be long here.”

  “Thank you, Elder.”