Creeping among the bushes was a tiny spider trying to escape from his prey.
He had caught a clay figure cloaked in leaves stitched together in odd shapes. At first, he thought nothing more of it than a broken-winged butterfly.
It turned out to be far from an easy prey.
Now, he was being hunted down by a village of gigantic ants, torching the forests and screaming murder.
The spider was not from a family of tap-dancing or downpipe-sliding nursery rhymes.
His name was Olio, and he was born in the bellies of unicorns.
Just like all Unitopods, he was kind, helpful, curious, and equipped with a golden whiff of hair above his eight eyes, a striking target for creatures of flight or angst.
Olio found a marigold bush and decided to lay low for the night.
The mob was relentless, swearing to spill blood and sew the gold fur onto their skin as war armor.
Olio would have none of it. He was tired pretending to be a flower all night, watching these stickmen chanting and destroying his home and all his webs.
They were getting bolder as more stars appeared in the sky. First, it was a diplomatic truce to save those trapped in the spider webs.
Then, they decided justice should not be bargained, it should be demanded in arms. Armies were trained, but the weaponry was controlled by an elite class, thus affluent offsprings get to fight in a war and likely survive and not die in vain.
For even the uneducated fisherman could tell that fighting against nature meant risking your life for an imbecile cause, however noble the politicians rallied up to be.
No one wanted to send their young to die, and so a civil war broke out.
When Olio yawned, the war had subsided, and religion took its course. But nothing could beat hard economics of scarcity, when faith was shaky and rice bowls were empty.
Gold was all they see. And gold was tempting to the clay blobs, a chance of a better life, a future under a better planet, under a nicer night sky.
Olio looked around his home, a barren wasteland with no webs and no spiders left.
He quietly shed his mane from his head, and as the twilight shone across the land, a tiny fluff glowed like a jewel polished by tender hands for an art truer, bolder and more noble than life itself.