They do not conceive of it as some celestial spider-god that will reach down into their green world and save them from the ant tied. However, the message *is*. The Messenger *is*. These are facts, and those facts are the doorway to an invisible, intangible world of the unknown. The true meaning of the message is that there is *more* than spider eyes can see or spider feet can feel. That is where hope lies, for there may yet be salvation hidden within that *more*. It inspires them to keep looking.
In Collegium it had been the fashion, while he had been resident there, to paint death as a grey-skinned, balding Beetle man in plain robes, perhaps with a doctor's bag but more often an artificer's toolstrip and apron, like the man who came in, at the close of the day, to put out the lamps and still the workings of the machines. Among his own people, death was a swift insect, gleaming black, its wings a blur - too fast to be outrun and too agile to be avoided, the unplumbed void in which he swam was but the depth of a single facet of its darkly jewelled eyes.