Arachna lies in prolonged darkness under the Off phase of its strange sun. Ezr Vinh descends with a small Qeng Ho team over frozen archipelagos while the main operations occur elsewhere. En route they glimpse a fresh volcanic eruption, raising brief speculation about surviving surface activity.

The team lands on a mountainside and hikes into a valley where unusually thin airsnow reveals intact Spider buildings. They lay out seismic sensors while moving toward a suspected cave entrance. Architecture details emphasize low, wide doors and shuttered windows, underscoring alien scale and design.

Seismic monitoring detects an impulsive sound from a nearby facade. Investigating, Ezr climbs to a ceramic box and, with remote analysts and Director Reynolt observing, helps identify it as a self-contained, spring-driven stripchart recorder tracking temperature, pressure, and other scalars—ingenious tech designed to survive centuries of cold.

From the same building, Ezr spots racks filled with hinged, fan-like objects and realizes they have found a library. The team brings in the walker scanner and begins high-speed digitization. Emergents propose mass artifact seizure and a staged rockfall to hide the site, but the Qeng Ho decline, instead prioritizing a follow-up mission. Trixia Bonsol advances graphemic analysis using physics and chemistry texts to accelerate reading.

During a brief break, Ezr explores a nearby plaza. Amid drifting fog lit by the dim OnOff star, he discovers lifelike Spider statues entangled around a hidden object, a poignant glimpse of culture that deepens the stakes of their find and the mystery of the Spiders’ civilization.