Peter Parker died on a Wednesday.

  He was twenty-four. Quiet. Slow. Almost peaceful.

  They called it mercy. That it ended. That the pain was over. That now he could rest.

  I smiled at the funeral. Not out of joy. I simply didn’t know what else to do.

  They buried him beneath a granite stone and plastic roses, beneath tears and trembling voices, beneath the weight of a thousand wasted words.

  But what they buried was not what I remembered.

  Peter was not a man at the end.

  He was a vision.

  A holy contortion of silk and skin.

  A cathedral of bone and spines, blooming from a body too small to hold it.

  He sang in clicks and pulses I could almost understand.

  The others recoiled in pity. Called it tragic. Monstrous.

  But I—I watched him. Every day. From the first fever to the last fractured breath.

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  I documented every shift in his body, every new limb that unfolded from his back like an offering. I saw it.

  I understood.

  Something ancient had touched him. Spoken through him.

  And then it took it all away.

  No warning. No explanation. Just silence.

  Like waking from a dream that still clings to your skin.

  Like watching a god tear off its mask and vanish.

  For a while, I tried to live.

  I went back to my classes. Avoided mirrors. Smiled at strangers. I even deleted the recordings. Burned the sketches.

  Pretended that he was just my friend.

  But there’s something about seeing divinity up close.

  You can’t unsee it.

  It was almost a year later. I was walking home from work—tired, numb, alive in the shallowest sense.

  The rain had just stopped. The asphalt steamed.

  And there it was.

  A spider. Dead. Flattened. Legs splayed like broken fingers.

  Tiny. Insignificant.

  But for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

  Not because it was dead. But because of what it reminded me of.

  The shape. The angles. The memory.

  Of Peter. Of the way his last eye blinked before his heart gave out.

  Of the soft skittering noise his fingers made when they dragged silk from his wrist like prayer beads.

  I knelt in the street, ignoring the cars.

  I picked it up.

  Held its crumpled body in my hand like a relic.

  A sign.

  Something returned.

  I went home that night and opened the drawer I promised never to touch again.

  The sketches were still there. Yellowed. Fragile. Holy.

  I whispered his name like a hymn.

  Peter.

  And the web inside me began to twitch.

  [End of Chapter II]