Amenta Lands of Stone.
That was the term the massive spider had used. Not the Lands of Stone, the way every tribe and empire and Sangoma had referred to the world for as long as anyone could remember, but the Amenta Lands of Stone, as though the name everyone knew was only half of a longer name that had been forgotten somewhere along the way.
Damian remembered the legend of Anansi.
Children were told the stories to frighten them, tales of a great spider who watched from places they could not see, who knew every secret and spun every fate. He had heard them himself as a boy, before the empire fell, before any of the rest of it. He had never once considered that the spider in those stories was real, let alone that it was floating on a meteorite above the world, calling itself a Guardian, shooting toward him through the vacuum of space with all of its many eyes shining in delight.
As Anansi approached, Damian gauged it the way he gauged everything now.
