Chapter One

Tiny furtive scuttling attracted the moss’ attention, or what passes for attention in cave moss. Little legs climbing out of the log it grew over, making their way deeper into the cave. That was new; The log had been thoroughly colonised by the moss and it’s kind, so the scuttling invader should never have made it this far.
As the moss subtly reformed to guide the … Pillbug, possibly? … along a suitable path, it reached out to it’s nearest brethren, passing along a simple message towards the cave mouth; “Is anything wrong?” In the other direction, ahead of the pillbug, it passed a different message; “Invader”.
Deeper in the cave, a cluster of toadstools very gently started releasing spores, which drifted softly down over the newly formed path the pillbug was unwittingly following. To the extent that it was aware, the pillbug had no idea that it had been detected by anything at all; It had found a path leading towards its dimly understood goal, the thing it could just barely sense somewhere deep in the cave, and with less of the moss in the way, it would get there faster. The strange dust drifting down was no impediment.
By the time the pillbug had stopped moving, poisoned by softly falling spores, a garbled message had come back from the cave mouth, reporting disruption but not destruction, impact seemingly without invasion.
The mosses and toadstools couldn’t make much sense of it, and in the very slow way of their kind, tried to gather more information, straining their senses to discover anything new. Instead of funnelling the scrap of energy they’d gained from defeating the invading pillbug into more growth, they held it in reserve, waiting to understand the situation better.
A force smashed half of the log moss flat, not destroying it, but pushing it down into the damp structure of the log. Something huge blocked the light, an enormous shape towering over the mosses and toadstools.
Determined not to be caught off guard and leave the next part of the cave unprepared, the moss reached out along paths it hadn’t used in its entire existence, reporting back to the something they guarded. With just the right kind of eyes, a spray of dim spluttering sparks could have been seen, jumping from moss patch to toadstool to wall slime, fueled by the energy from the pillbug, heading back into the depths along a hundred different paths.

The cave spider on the roof had exactly the right sort of eyes to watch those sparks. It watched them sputtering off into the distance, then turned it’s attention back to looking down on the figure sitting slumped on the log.
“How,” It wondered. “Am I supposed to catch that?”