The human’s cry from beyond the door snapped him out of it. Yu seized the bowl before him – no tray, no second guessing – and carried it to the kitchen door. Pressing his back to the wood, he dragged the handle down with his elbow.

Just as he turned toward the common room, his gaze flicked upward to the mural above the door; that grotesque sprawl of arachnids locked in battle with the desperate humanoid figures, masses of limbs and abdomen knotted into a monstrous coil. The sight made him pause. For a moment, he simply looked, craning his neck to see from directly beneath. He waited for the shapes to stir, for the bulging bodies to strain against the plane of the wall, for the jointed legs to twitch toward the orblight. In a twisted way, he wanted them to move — for something outside to echo the crawling within.

But the painting stayed still. The fear was dead. Nothing in pigment could reach him anymore. In the end, it was nothing but an ugly, ridiculous, unreal thing.

Yu passed beneath it.

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