She wants her magic back. Well, the tiny little pieces of her magic that she might be able to earn in this prison, anyway. But whatever, she wants her magic back. Still, sometimes she wishes she just didn’t stumble on some of the things that happen in this place either. Today it is spiders and ants, and in truth, it’s not like she has a clue if the spiders will reward her for helping. She can only hope that the large – like overly large, she would rather be anywhere else large – spiders will reward her for playing with bugs.

Why was she in the Deep Forest in the first place? For the same reason she was anywhere that was not the Threshold, Falls, or Endless Blue; she was heading to one of those places. Today she was on her way to the Endless Blue when the ginormous spiders caught her attention. Okay, maybe not that large, but they were easily still the size of her hoof. Which is just not okay. And they were staring rather hungrily at an ant hill, which was teeming with ants.

Somewhere in here, this day definitely ended with her getting bitten to high hell.

Still, she goes. There’s already a few horses there trying to wrangle the ants. Dragomir and that boy with his millions of questions (he totally has a name, and she’s pretty sure its Zubari or something like that). There’s others she doesn’t know, and other than a nod at Dragmoir and Zubari, she doesn’t stop to chat. That said, she does stop for a moment to watch what everyone is up to.

They’ve all set up various traps for the ants with webs. Some stallion….no, not stallion, actually, just a feminine dude – stands there asking if there’s a way to speed them up. She knows, having stepped on enough ants in her life, that those dead ant’s friends come flocking. Why? She hasn’t a clue. If she knew anything about biology, she’d know it’s related to the way ants communicate using pheromones, and that a smashed ant brings a lot of other ants that are often angry to the rescue. But she doesn’t need to know the mechanics behind why it happens. Just that it happens.

She thinks for a moment about using the webs already set up, but she cares enough not to get anyone else bitten to high hell. So instead, she finds another place where the spiders could weave a web that is set away from everyone else. “Could you put a web here too?” she asks, feeling ridiculous for talking to spiders but knowing they can hear and understand her.

When they are done, she grabs a large leaf in her mouth and sticks it in front of some of the marching ants until a few have piled onto the leaf. Moving quickly, given that there are now ants on a leaf that is literally in her mouth and eating ants and having her legs possibly bitten are two very different things, she makes her way behind the web she had the orb spiders build. She drops the leaf quickly and then promptly stomps on the ants. Possibly she should feel bad for what she’s just done, but really, she’s feeding that spiders so the ants are going to die anyway,

She’s pretty sure she should be close enough that some of the ants will leave their task at hand. The smell of their dead friends should bring them racing from their path toward the scent, and hopefully into the web that stands directly in their path. With luck, the ants are not smart enough to head around the web. But the web is large and there’s enough trees and other bushes standing in their way that she hopes they have no choice but to get stuck.