The images flashed into my mind the moment I touched her leg, starting with a small spidder, no larger than the size of your fist, crawling backwards along the ground, dragging a mushroom behind it. She dragged it from the base of one Elder tree to another, where she pulled aside a leaf and entered her burrow within the tree. It was small, about the size of a well bucket, but she had ample space to store this mushroom along with two others against the walls.
As she set it down, she noticed a number of smaller mushrooms sprouting out from the dirt floor of the burrow, and silently began expanding the burrow to the left of the entrance. Over the next few days, she created a smaller room in her burrow and let the mushrooms sprout everywhere in the main room, using a piece of tree bark to separate the rooms.
When it began to rain each day, she carved out another room higher up in the tree, adding an entrance directly into it so she wouldn't have to worry about flooding. When the air became dry and cold, she didn't panic trying to find food, as she had a large supply of mushrooms in her burrow. However, when winter came, she had other spidders her size trying to get into her burrow, able to smell the food hidden behind the leaf.
There were four in total, scrambling over each other after easily crushing the leaf covering the entrance. They kept trying to move forward, trying to attack her to get her food, but failing, as one of the others would push them back and reset their progress. After a few minutes of this, she wished they would calm down and leave, and slowly, they became less aggressive and eventually began to walk away.
Shocked that her wish came true, she felt bad that they would surely freeze and starve to death in the cold rain drizzling around the tree, so she wished they would come back and stay and lo and behold, they did.
They walked into her burrow in a single file line, and each took a piece of a mushroom, sat down and ate it before walking up to her. They didn't do anything else, they stood there confused, but waiting for something else to do.
She ignored them, however, and thought about expanding the space in her burrow to store more food other than the mushrooms. When she turned around, the four spidders were gone, and she found them using their acid to carve away at the wood, just like she did.
She then went up to the newest room in the burrow, and relaxed after the difficult time those four spidders gave her, and eventually fell asleep.
When she woke up, the spidders were asleep in the small dent they had made in the tree. It wasn't a whole room, but it was much more than she could've done in an entire day, done in a few hours. She went and brought them some food for when they woke up, before spending some time to think about what she did. She thought over it for a while, and came to the conclusion that she would influence other spidders to do what she wants.
By the time the next winter came around, there were 18 other spidders helping her around her burrow, each with specific jobs such as harvesting mushrooms, scavenging meat from outside and expanding the burrow. There were now 6 different rooms in her burrow. One for farming and storing mushrooms, one for storing meats and bugs, one large main room that connects all the others, two for the spidders to sleep, and one as her personal sleeping room.
Once Spring blossomed, almost all the spidders under her command became busy gathering food and materials. She was also very busy, and by the end of Spring, she had laid seven eggs. She had her workers create seven offshoot rooms to hers for each egg, and gave each egg a personal bodyguard to protect the egg and care for the spidderlings once they hatched.
"Hello there little one." a feminine voice resounded through her mind. She didn't understand the words, but knew what they meant somehow. She looked around, searching for the source of the sound, and then it began again. "I suppose it would be easier if you could see me, wouldn't it?" the voice said as a small flower rapidly blossomed from the floor of her sleeping room, and once it did, an effeminate figure bathed in green light, like the sun shining through the forest canopy, formed above it.
"Is this better for you?" she said with a light chuckle.
The spidder crawled towards the flower and tapped its leaves with one of her front legs, before backing away and tilting her head to the left.
"Yes, this is real, you don't need to worry," the figure said, chuckling again, "I am one of the three Dryads serving Vert, charged with the observation and preservation of the northern woods. All of us Dryads have been searching for one such as you for quite some time now. It took a while longer to find you than expected, but once you began to exercise your abilities, it was easy to do so."
The spidder sat down, turned her head to the right and tapped her head.
"Ah yes, you don't understand the words I'm saying, but you get the message," the Dryad said, "I'm not completely sure how it works either, I'll have to ask Vert about it when I report this to them."
"Now," the Dryad sighed, and sat down on the flower, "the reason we have been searching for you, is because you, or your descendants, have been chosen to be the guide for those soon to come. It may be quite a while, not for many hundreds or thousands of years from now, but they will come.
"When they do, you will be needed to keep watch over them and to maintain the balance of the forest. For you see, the ancient codes prevent us from directly intervening with the new arrivals, with very few exceptions, so if they decide to put the wilds in peril, we cannot do anything beyond help it recover.
"To help you all with this, I wish to give a blessing to your spawn, that will cause them to have the same abilities you possess, becoming more powerful and smarter with each generation. With this blessing, they will become queens in their own right, just as you have here, only on a much larger scale. Will you accept the blessing in exchange for protecting Vert's domain when we, the Dryads, cannot?"
The spidder closed her eyes and bowed her head, before standing up and pointing towards the egg and the spidder guarding it. The seven guards brought the eggs all in one place, and the Dryad smiled, and extended her hand over the eggs, before a warm green light fell upon them, the energy being taken in by the unborn spidders, before fading.
"On behalf of Vert, I thank you, young queen, for your cooperation in this endeavor. I hope that, when the day comes, your will descendants will remember this and help maintain this second chance we have all been given."
The Dryad radiated a bright green light, and when it faded they were gone, leaving behind only the flower in the center of the room and a mark on each of the eggs to designate the future queens.