72nd Spring, 515AV
Even when he was not with her, Ayatah still heard Kuame's voice, like a shadow of a memory or an alternate reality.
Look, Aya! Birds!
Wow, look at that monkey!
He would like the Menagerie, but today Ayatah was not visiting the zoo for pleasantries or to gaze at the cute animals. In fact, the Myrian bypassed all creatures of fur and feather, opting instead to head straight towards one of the larger exhibits.
It looked like any other room, all dark and almost cosy in its low lighting and soft materials. A large swath of silk hung from the ceiling in a way that almost looked artistic. But Aya moved her eyes through the darkness, doing her utmost to avoid feeling impressed. She had not yet decided how she felt about the Symenestra exhibit, and would not make up her mind about it until she saw at least one of the specimens.
It soon became evident that she would need to wait a while. There was no sign of life within the exhibit, so for want of anything better to do, Aya sat down on a nearby bench. She wished she had bought a book with her, anything to take her mind off the gloominess of the exhibit. But she felt oddly drawn to it, intruiged by the false reality that existed within.
What, she supposed, would she do if she were captured and thrown into a cage to be stared at?
Her silent reply was harsh and utterly, purely Myrian: I'd petchin' skill whoever had caught me in the first place. But even a warrior of Myri would find a tough struggle against a single Akalak -- let alone a whole team of them. She would be left with the same options as all the previously captured Symenestra had been given: suicide or escape. Both choices ended in death, she assumed.
Perhaps it was no different to keeping a bird in a cage. Ayatah thought of Kiwi, her beloved feathered friend. But even he did not spend his entire time constrained to his birdcage, instead fluttering about Aya's apartment and small garden. And what freedom did the captured Symenestra have in their cage? A fake reality that attempted to mimic the lives of their brethren in Kalinor.
Aya twisted from her seat, straining in the dim light to read what little information about the Spider people that she could see from the bench. She knew very little about the Symenestra, other than the fact they originated from Falyndar before being chased out by Aya's own ancestors. For her, it was an uncomfortable closeness of the historical kind.
Because of the toxicity of their blood, many female Symenestra die during childbirth. As such, many families use a surrogate whom the father will impregnate, to have their child. Such offspring, of which three is always the maximum, are regarded as pure-blooded Symenestra.