It was going to be a long march. I didn't actually know how long it would take, or how far it was... only what direction from my forest and what I was looking for. Such should be good enough in an age like this! Heck, it was good enough directions for me when I was either gaming or asking people for directions in real life in any of my previous lives.

It was a good time I thought, to talk about various river myths I was aware of. The Japanese kappa monster, which terrified children into fearing water at night when they were alone- a good idea really. Children couldn't fall unattended into water and drown without being seen if they took this fear to heart. Same for La Llarona, or 'the weeping woman' from Mexican mythology. That's what the two myths had in common. What they didn't, was the secondary teaching. The kappa taught children how to show courtesy in the cultural sense, and Llarona taught the evils of selfish vanity.

My children could at least in part read my mind, or at least hear my emotions, so I didn't think that making up scary monsters would be particularly helpful in what I was trying to get across. Instead, I could just tell them the full stories, as far as I had heard them, and what function they were supposed to have in the societies they originated. There were various semi-recognizable animals that came to drink from the streams we walked along, and I don't think I had to be more descriptive when we were ourselves monsters preying on whatever dropped its guard to do something it was biologically forced to do.

One of the animals almost looked like something someone would model in a game, if created by two artists arguing whether or not the creature was a bull or a horse. Its torso was thick, but not thick enough to be stocky. Its legs were thin and long, and its neck was long and thick, but not graceful. If it had different contours, then it would be graceful, but as it was, no. It had horns, or at least a couple of them did, but they were surprisingly fragile. Maybe they were just decorative?

We slept that night and woke up early, as we always did, and began to march again. Two days later, three from our outset, we saw what looked like a farming village further upstream. When we arrived, we could tell that nothing was alive here. I figured it was a city that was destroyed by the other drider colony we had to deal with. The stream passed through the center of the village, and walkways were on each side; buildings facing them. Continuing straight forward was a forest. The spider webs were easy to spot- it was creepy. The webs weren't nice and set up attractively like ours were; they seemed to be made by colonies of smaller spiders, or maybe just by less aesthetic big ones. Possibly dumber too, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

...

We slowed down as per my wishes, and I started to teach my children something called 'formation'. Malas was very... yeah, he wasn't going for it. He usually just had to be dragged along by his arm by one of his sisters. Damn that obliviousness-based reincarnation skill of his! Sure it would protect him in this life, but in the previous life we shared together, it killed him.

Proceeding carefully through the enemy drider's forest, I couldn't help but notice signs of battle. Broken branches with scraps of cloth or leather scraps, bones, and other things caught in the fragmented wood. There wasn't anything recent, but I knew there shouldn't be. There was a smell of something rotten, but I didn't actually see any dead bodies. The drider must have eaten them, or so I figured.

That's when I saw it. It was funny really- this drider cave looked almost exactly like the entrance to my own, but it didn't have a small lake. It did have the stream that came from who-knows-where and went through the town, and into the forest, and apparently down into the cave itself. There were patches of dried grass, moldy leaves, and other forest-type debris around in wide circles. It was rather obvious to me what it was similar to, but it was just so easy to figure out that I couldn't be right. Right?