[centre][h1][color=bc8dbf]The Spider[/color][/h1][/centre][centre][u]Interacting:[/u] [@Kronshi][/centre]
The spider froze where she was as the terrible cry reverberated through her legs, panic flooding her as for the briefest of moments some primal fear of the creatures of the sky made her forget about anything else. In the second it took her to get a hold of herself, her main eyes had already swivelled towards the sky, frantically scanning for the source of the cry, even as the beat of her heart adjusted in preparation to bolt.

She almost did make a break for it when she saw the shape descending from the heavens, heading almost directly towards the group, but before she could make any rash decisions, the figure resolved itself in her vision and she recognised it as the winged human. The spider wasn’t sure if she could trust that one, but for now at least they appeared more person than bird, so she decided to regard them as the former for the time being. In any case, their unscrupulous features aside, she doubted they had been the one to make the terrifying sound.

When the first of the flames started to fall the spider almost didn’t notice them, the fire almost invisible to her save for a slight distortion in the air and vague greenish haze. When one of the flames landed mere feet away, the heat licking at her carapace, on the other hand, she suddenly became far more aware of them, finally forcing her gaze away from the sky and back to her surroundings.

Focusing upon the candle-like shimmers raining down from the sky, the spider was quick to realise that she would need to find shelter. What was there to cover beneath? Plenty… but what would insulate her from the heat and wouldn’t itself be at risk of igniting? 

Through her secondary eyes, the spider saw the shaman raise her staff and do… something; she wasn’t quite sure what exactly, beyond a vague idea it had probably been magic and that it seemed to stop the flames directly above her from touching down. That was a promising start, and the spider immediately started scurrying towards the shaman, only to pause again a moment later when she saw others doing the same, a familiar fear rising within her as she imagined one of the comparatively gargantuan humanoids stepping upon her as they manoeuvred the limited cover.

Could she take cover under some of the existing debris? Maybe, but looking at the human construction she wasn’t confident such a shelter wouldn’t just collapse and crush her if someone stepped on it. What about a corpse, humans had pretty strict rules about what one could and couldn’t do to corpses and she was pretty sure stepping on them was on the taboo list, right? The spider could see a pile of blackened bodies and almost rushed for it, before she spotted the bald woman wading in and decided that she might have been wrong about the corpse thing.

Scanning about some more, the spider spotted a person lying on the ground near the edge of the barrier – not another corpse but a still-living person; the grey-skinned human she’d seen earlier. The thought occurred to her that she might use them as cover – surely the humans would be more reluctant to hurt one of their own – but she quickly decided that was probably a terrible idea.

Sure, unless she was really, really wrong about human rules, they probably wouldn’t be stepped on, but she was pretty certain there was also some kind of rule about creatures hating anything with more limbs than them, and spiders had more limbs than anything else – except for centipedes, but everyone hated centipedes. 

Then again, it wasn’t like the man needed to know she was there… unlike her, the humans had no carapaces and instead wrapped themselves in clothes that they could not effectively feel through, and the grey-skinned man, in particular, had plenty of loose cloth she could potentially hide within.

She was still pretty certain that it was a terrible idea, but as she saw the man getting up and realised the opportunity was slipping away, the spider acted on impulse, scuttling over to the human and quickly sequestering herself beneath his coat.

At the same time as the spider hid herself away, her simulacrum – which had been following behind her all this time while acting out a pantomime of her true intentions – suddenly veered off course. For all the spell that governed the logic behind the illusion was a sophisticated thing, it was still largely reliant on her senses to guide it and without them its actions became confused. 

Sensing the simulacrum straying off course through her connection to the construct, the spider hesitated only briefly before exerting her will and forcing it to a stop. She could feel that her spell was standing a good few meters away from her – almost certainly a decent ways outside the safety of the barrier – but at the same time, without peeking out from her hiding place she wouldn’t be able to guide it closer in any way that didn’t obviously reveal its nature as an illusion, and there was no way she was going to risk revealing herself now that her ride was up and about.

Well, it wasn’t like the construct was at any real risk of being damaged by the flames or whatever it was that had let out that shriek before, being intangible and all, so the spider simply directed the simulacrum to turn away from the shaman’s shelter and prayed that no one would think to question its actions.