Author's Note: Chapter 3 is short, and looking at what I plan to do for touching up the other chapters, it'll end up being the only 10k-ish chapter among 16-20k chapters. Now, we don't want to spend too long with Sirius and Taylor mistakenly anticipating back-stabbings in the near future (how long it lasts now still feels good to me in retrospect), and I'm not going to force it to be longer just to fit the trend, but there's one thing that deserves more attention than it got, even if it ultimately is a narrative dead-end either way. Let's look in on the Acromantula.

This scene slots in right after the scene where Taylor first encounters the Dementors, accompanied by a bunch of small changes throughout the chapter to ensure she doesn't know about the Acromantula (I think they're not commonly known to be in the Forbidden Forest in canon? It doesn't make sense, in retrospect, that Taylor was aware of them and their specific species name at the start of this chapter) until after, and a bunch of other minor things to fit this in neatly.

There was something magical in the Forbidden Forest.

This was a given, but more specifically there was something magical that her power was still working on figuring out. The telltale throb of a magic headache kept Taylor company as she waited in the trees for night to fall. It was stronger than when she was in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley, almost as strong as when she tried to use her new wand on a spell she hadn't already practiced until her arm hurt.

Usually, when her power attempted to figure a new facet of magic out, Taylor had no trouble identifying the magic in question. She had to experience, see, or otherwise perceive it for her power to notice. Or so she thought; that was what she had observed while in Diagon Alley, and as of yet no evidence had been provided to the contrary. The limits of her bug-controlling range were the limits, period.

It wasn't anything Black might be doing; she had insectoid eyes on him, much closer to the edge of the forest. He would have to retreat soon, when the Dementors came around, but for now his wand was in his robe pocket and he was looking forlornly at the castle. Hardly the behavior of someone actively performing magic on her. It couldn't be entirely ruled out, but if he was competent enough to set something up without her noticing, he would have done something a lot more direct and dangerous. In for a penny, in for a pound. Black didn't do half-measures.

Black was the only living thing larger than a sparrow within her range. Any ambient magic would have set her headache off long before today. No wizards had come into the forest to cast new magic, she and Black would have noticed that during their Dementor observations. So…

Something new was happening. Perhaps a long-range casting of some kind, or an area of effect being laid from afar. One with no obvious effect, but magic enough to affect her–

Behind her, deeper in the forest, several trees swayed, the bugs resting on them all moving in unison as their perches were shaken. Dense weights scraped and pressed in many places, moving fast and precisely, but with a serious amount of force behind each impact.

Her headache intensified, moving from a slight pain behind her eyes to something deeper in her forehead. From her power, she got a sense of consternation, wholly inexplicable.

"That…" She turned, even as she grouped her insects up and set them in the path of the movements, which had stalled right on the edge of her range for the moment. What she saw, sensed, and felt as she moved everything into position…

It was a spider. Eight-legged, hairy with jet-black follicles, oversized pedipalps situated just under its eight black eyes, perched on the side of a tree at a right angle to the ground.

Its torso was the size of a bear and its legs each longer than she was tall. Furthermore, and now she thought she might understand why her power was feeling offended, it was not under her control like all of the normal spiders. To her senses, it might as well be a spider-shaped bird, or monkey, or any other kind of creature that would no more fall under her control than a rock.

But, as she observed, she realized that the lack of awareness was not necessarily two-way. The spider cautiously skittered along the exact edge of her control, nimbly leaping from tree to tree and where possible moving without sound. That was… highly unlikely to happen unless the spider could feel something.

It, like the Dementors, was not wholly unaware of her power's presence. The normal spiders and other insects did not garner the oversized spider's attention, but her range, her influence… It continued to scout the very edge, never coming more than a few steps within.

Taylor was supposed to be watching for Dementors, and watching Black – both of which she was still doing for the moment – but this needed to be investigated. The giant spider was no Atlas, but she could never say no to a horror movie spider if her power was going to try and get one for her. She turned away from her perch in the crook of a tree, dropped to the ground, and began walking towards the spider. Her range moved with her, pushing fully over the massive arachnid that was so carefully avoiding getting too far in.

Contrary to Taylor's hopes and half-formed expectations, this did not give her control over the spider. Nor did it scare the spider off. Based on what she was seeing and sensing through her normal bugs, the spider didn't care that much. It scuttled around, sought out the new edge of her range, crossed out, then crossed right back in again with some caution, but not as much as before.

Her headache spiked, but nothing happened beyond that.

Curious. "Need some help?" she asked aloud. Though she didn't know what help she could offer. She had yet to learn any mind-affecting spells, and killing the spider would be counterproductive.

Her power pulsed with distant discontent and frustration. Not a yes, not a no, but much clearer than anything she could have gotten prior to regaining their connection. This was not a simple 'wait and it will be done' affair; more needed to happen.

Taylor did want a giant spider. Her wand was already in her hand as she continued to walk towards the defiant arachnid. She left Black behind to continue his vigil alone, blissfully unaware of what was happening. If – when – she turned on him, this would make a good trump card. A wizard could probably kill a giant spider with minimal difficulty, but only if they knew to expect one. This spider was big and nimble enough that it could perform both parts of the typical sneak attack on its own; the stealthy approach and the sudden violent strike.

Thinking about it, she really wanted this spider. It was solidly within her range now, only a block away. As she approached, it began to spin up a proportionally-sized web at head height between two trees. The silk it produced was sticky and strong, variable in thickness depending on which part of the web the spider was making. The thickest parts were like ropes.

She hadn't gotten anywhere on deciding what she was going to do by the time she caught sight of the spider with her own eyes, flashes of black legs through the foliage. Seeing limbs topped with claws big enough to stab through her put a bit of a damper on her ambitions. This was not safe, not while her power continued to struggle uselessly.

What could she do? Kill it, swarm it, incapacitate it… her options for capturing it were nonexistent. The stunning spell was on her list to learn, but she didn't know it right now. Knocking it over the head with a rock would accomplish nothing, and most of her options boiled down to some variation of that.

Her power was absolutely no help in deciding on a plan of action. Knowing that it was doing something told her nothing about what it was doing, how, or what it intended to accomplish.

The spider finished its ominously large web, and instead of waiting to see what got caught, set off through the forest, away from her. Into the depths. Maybe it was a species that set their nets and only came back later to check on them, like a human hunter would do with traps for small game. She didn't remember off-hand if any spiders she knew of actually did that, but it was plausible and this thing was unlike any of the smaller spiders she currently had to compare to.

If it didn't stay with its webs, it must have some form of a den. Somewhere it returned to, where it could reliably be found later.

She followed well behind, staying far back enough that there was no chance of it noticing her physical presence, and followed the spider into the depths of the forest. If she could track it to its hiding place, she could come back once she knew the stunning spell.

The forest grew dark around her as she stalked her unwitting prey. Little moved within her range, even as she went deeper in. Massive spider webs and more stereotypical cobwebs became recurring obstacles, ones the spider navigated with ease. It preferred to travel through the treetops, avoiding the ground, where most of the traps were laid.

The forest was eerily quiet, and twice Taylor passed by small animals stuck to webs, once a squirrel and once a six-legged thing she didn't recognize at all, but which most closely resembled a turtle with no shell and fine yellow hair down its back like a mohawk. Both were dead, but neither had been fed upon.

She was no fool; she knew that there were too many webs to be made by a solitary spider. There had to be more, and this was their territory, explaining the lack of other predators. Going in alone, on what amounted to a whim, would be foolishly dangerous for anyone else. She had the safety net of her power ensuring that she would see any dangers before they saw her, but that only made this less risky.

Still, she kept going. It was no more dangerous than observing the Dementors. That was necessary, and one could argue this was not, but it might come in handy.

It would definitely come in handy if her power could crack whatever was interfering with its ability to take over the spider, but that hadn't happened yet.

Then Taylor's range came upon a small, dim part of the forest completely ensconced in webs, and she knew that for better or worse she was no longer searching for the spider's den. She had found it.

Dozens of similarly sized monsters hung, scuttled, and stalked in the marked part of the forest, moving about each other with chittering vocalizations that were much too loud and complex for comfort. A truly massive spider sat at the center of the activity, its fangs buried in the carcass of a deer, unmoving as it sucked out the liquified insides at a slow, steady pace. There were an abundance of flies, maggots, and little beetles for Taylor to explore with, and they all discovered the same thing as they dispersed to join with her swarm.

The spiders were here, there were many of them, and the arrival of her influence and the spider she had been following was noticed by all. The big one pulled its fangs out of its unfortunate meal, while the smaller ones swarmed the clearing, moving erratically as they searched for – something. The source of whatever it was they felt while Taylor's power attempted, and failed, to take them over for her use.

Her initially targeted spider navigated through the madness to the largest one, and made all manner of inexplicable sounds at it, complete with limb gestures. The big one replied–

"Shit." It was at that point that Taylor realized she had been heavily underestimating the intelligence of these spiders. She assumed normal insect brains, only upscaled in size. That wasn't the case. She didn't understand the language, but it was clear they had one. Perhaps it was only as complex as bees signaling each other with scents, but she wouldn't bet on it at this point. Not with magic involved, as it had to be.

Her power was still trying – or, that was how she interpreted the continued headache – but she wasn't willing to stick around. The spiders were agitated, growing more so, and some of them were leaving the web-demarcated bounds of their hideout to look through the forest around it.

Taylor turned around and began walking – briskly, but she was far enough away from the commotion that she didn't need to run – away.

That was, as it turned out, a mistake.

Her awareness, once she got far enough away, withdrew from the spiders' den. And it did so in a direction, pulling back with her movement. Most of the spiders she was tracking with smaller bugs fell out of her awareness and stayed out, but a few, four in total, started following her.

They could feel her influence, where it started and ended. As long as they followed the edge of that feeling as it moved, they could follow her. Indefinitely.

They were using her power against her.

"Now would be a good time to figure out why you can't take control of them," she told her power. There would be no escaping, and worse, the only places she could go were elsewhere in the forest, Hogwarts, or Hogsmeade. She had no desire to lure four giant spiders to either of the latter locations.

Her power failed to respond in any meaningful way. She was on her own.

If the spiders wouldn't lose track of her, she would drive them off. Up until now, her normal bugs had gone unnoticed, but she had a lot of them already on the spiders following her, and many more waiting above and below them as they moved through the trees. Now, she sent them all in. At the eyes, the spinneret, any and all of the bits not covered by the exoskeleton, targeting every nook and cranny a bug could work itself into and then bite or sting.

Human or spider, having little painful biting things in one's most vulnerable locations was painful. Spiders had eight eyes each and exactly zero eyelids or equivalent body parts to cover them, and no fingers to wipe or shield their faces. One of the four she attacked that way ran face-first into a tree trunk during their blind struggles, another fell out of a tree, and the other two turned and booked it back the way they had come, fleeing by touch alone. If they had been tracking her by sight she wouldn't have been surprised if they tried to rush and kill her, but no spider had ever seen her physical body, only felt her power's presence. They didn't know for sure that she, as a human, even existed, so they had no choice but to flee.

The one that had hit a tree climbed up it and fled deeper into her area of control, perpendicular to the direction she had been fleeing. She had no idea what, if anything, was in that direction, beyond more forest, so she let it go. The other…

Well, she didn't have an instinctive grasp of its vitals like she did her bugs, but everyone knew what rolling onto its back and curling all of its legs up like that meant for a spider.

She waited for a few minutes – she had walked far enough out of the spiders' territory that a white horse trotted by on the far edge of her awareness, the single horn that denoted it a creature of myth prominently displayed, which made a for a nice distraction – but the spider didn't get up.

Then, curiosity, both her own and her power's, drove her to investigate it with her own hands and eyes. When would she next get the chance to look at a dead spider that was that big? And maybe poking it would give her power that last bit of help it needed to take control of the others. Magic seemed to act through mediums and touch sometimes, and if magic was stopping her power, magic might be the answer.

Taylor carefully approached the dark corpse curled up on the forest floor, keeping aware of any movement on the edges of her range. The spider was terrifying up close, all legs and claws and bulbous body curled together. She approached it from the front, noting that because it had no eyelids its eyes were all by necessity still open in death. Those that were still there, anyway. Nary a twitch shook its figure as she came closer.

Those clenched limbs wouldn't ease up, not even in death. If Taylor remembered old research correctly, spider limbs had more in common with hydraulic systems than the muscles and bones of mammals. She thought that, barring magic or biological oddities, the exoskeleton would be the last part of the spider carcass to decay.

Up close, she could see the fine fur that her bugs had landed on and in throughout the pursuit and then about-turn. She wondered if anyone had ever made anything out of giant spider fur.

Her headache had gone away shortly after the spider curled up and the others left her range. Here she was, within touching distance – though she hadn't yet – and her power was telling her that there was nothing interesting around. That was as good a proof of death as any.

She reached out to touch it. Her fingers grazed spiky, short fur.

The spider remained firmly, unquestionably… unconscious, because it twitched. Spasmed, really.

Taylor's headache returned, spiked horribly, and then dissipated again, leaving her breathless even as she backed away from the insensate arachnid.

Stupid. She should have been absolutely positive that it was dead before she got close to it. Her power couldn't control it, she couldn't sense it, why did she think that she knew for certain that it was dead just because it fell out of a tree, curled up, and failed to register as a thing of magical interest to her power's attention?

But, dumb mistakes she would be sure not to repeat aside, she had what she wanted. An unconscious spider at her power's disposal.

It was really too bad that at that very moment her power very clearly gave up. Disappointment, spite, irritation, concession, all strong and thoroughly conveyed through the lingering aftershocks of that last dagger to her skull.

Too strong, too strange, or too protected, her power had stopped trying to take control of the giant spider.

Taylor was left to walk back to her abandoned observation post, metaphorically empty-handed and pondering the meaning of the second magical effect capable of making her power give up, found in the form of a spider of all things. First a spectral guardian powered by happiness, and now something that should have been right in her power's wheelhouse? Another lesson, right on the heels of the first, about making assumptions. She didn't know how this world worked, or what she might find in the depths of the unknown. Magic was not yet predictable to her, not even in the most basic of patterns.

Black was still in his position when she returned, unaware of her departure or failure.

That was good. She couldn't afford to show weakness to him. She would just have to do this without the backup of a horde of bear-sized spiders, or specialized Dementor repellant charms.

Nothing was ever easy.

And, later, where the original mention of her power giving up on Acromantula would be, we would instead check back up on them before moving on to the rest of the scene's musings.

After her encounter with the giant spiders, Taylor made sure to triple-check that she knew at least in broad strokes every magical animal native to Britain. When that search didn't yield answers, she looked to guides detailing magical species abroad and found out that Acromantula, as she now knew they were called, weren't even supposed to be in the country. They were an invasive species that, as of the time of printing of her sources, didn't live anywhere outside of South America and Australia.

This did not fill her with confidence about the accuracy of her sources, but at least now she knew what they were. Deadly, known wizard-killers, and some were capable of speaking English. They kept to their part of the forest, and she had yet to encounter another outside of the web-strewn areas.

She left them alone. Her power radiated irritation whenever one glanced against the edge of her awareness, so she assumed that whatever had stopped it from taking over was still insurmountable. Given that, she was glad they weren't more active in the forest as a whole. They would make hiding out there a lot harder.

Not that anything involving magic in any capacity was easy. The forest with its curious and often dangerous wildlife was only one example. Personal use was another.

Taylor could, with her power's assistance, do magic. But each individual spell took her days of concentrated effort and crippling headaches to learn, no matter how simple. Her first-year textbook said Wingardium Leviosa was easy enough for eleven-year-olds to learn in one or two class sessions, but it had taken her several four-hour practice sessions in the Leaky Cauldron to get her apple to move at all, and another handful of sessions to perfect it.

Author's Note: So… nothing really happens beyond 'Taylor and her power poke a spider with a metaphorical stick, Taylor gets jump-scared and her power gives up in disgust', but now we get to see it happen, instead of it being mentioned off-hand and then forgotten about. I contemplated making it bigger, a whole massive fight scene… but Taylor isn't yet combat-ready with even basic spells, so she would be stuck fighting solely with her bugs and hand-to-hand as a last resort, neither of which really appealed to me. I'm not entirely happy with this scene even so (and as such it's a lot more tentative of a potential addition than some of the other AUT entries here), so I'd welcome feedback on how this feels both in isolation and within the context of the chapter.

Also, coming soon: a joke / speculative alternate ending based on how Taylor would act if she could control Acromantula as easily as any other bug.