So long had the star-spider Ulos-Reišf dwelt among the asteroids that even she had half-forgotten when and whence she came, but her thirst and her hunting-craft were as sharp as ever, and in this 262,144th decade of her sojourn she made better carousing than ever. Her infrangible, self-organizing webs were strung among many asteroids, and she scuttled along them untiringly, gathering the harvest of souls caught in their ætheric toils and returning with them to the great asteroid whereon she dwelt. But no human eye could have marked her passage or traced the million-kilometer strands of her webs, for she and they were too ghostly to have been detected by our feeble senses or our crude instruments, and barely impinge on the matter of this plane of existence. Indeed, her webs survived unscathed as fire-tailed comets passed through them, plunging sunward or creeping home to the icy outer twilight, and stretched and re-attached without breaking as the asteroids swung in their endless circuits around the hydrogen-fueled furnace of the sun.
When Ulos-Reišf was not harvesting or drinking the vintage of her harvest, she would sit on her asteroid and scan the face of the heavens with her ten-thousand præter-crystal eyes, whose sharpness was sufficient to read the blemishes of Betelgeuse or catch a glint of intergalactic dust across half the width of the Universe. Sometimes she watched the outer solar system and traced the storm patterns of the gas-giants, or the particulous shifting of their rings, or the curious topographies of their myriad moons; sometimes she watched the inner solar system and observed the dust-devils of Mars, or the levin-veined clouds of Venus, or the boiling metal lakes of Mercury; mostly, however, she watched the souls that were thrown off the planet Earth in an unending varicolored spume, and that sped in minutes beyond the orbit of Mars, to be caught, with rare exceptions, in her cunningly strung and positioned asteroidal webs.
Those few souls that escaped she might watch for a time, speeding out through the chilly silence of space she knew not whither, though their apparent trajectory terminated, perhaps too often to be coincidental, in such eclipsing binaries as Algol. But it was rare that she could watch the soul-spume of Earth or those few escapees for long, for gradually her thirst would re-awaken and she would broach her flasks of soul-wine again or scuttle out on her webs to gather a new vintage. Thus had she lived and drunk for more than two thousand millennia, savoring the increasing subtlety and flavor of the souls she caught as man rose from the cradle of his animal past. The souls of ape-men she had drunk longest of all, fiery with brute passion and brief life; but her palate was never coarsened and when her wine, pressed from the true humanity of later eras, contained the souls of great philosophers or mathematicians, she knew and was drunk with headier delights. Those and many others she had drunk: stone-age kings, harsh with butchery and sacrifice; the scribes of Mesopotame and calligraphers of Cathay, spiced with curious wisdoms; emperors and popes, hot with a hundred sins; thousand on thousand of the famed; million on million of the forgotten.
But one day, as she sat and watched the soul-spume of Earth, her drunkenness lullaby’d by the plucked tones of her asteroid-strung webs, a great flame sprang out on the curve of the planet, brighter for a moment than the sun; and the soul-spume thickened as never before in her experience, streaming starward in a death-splendor of billions. She had drunk astronomers too in her long sojourn, and knew at once that a God-hammer had fallen as some of them had long warned, and that her final vintage was being garnered in her webs. A week later, the soul-spume was shrunk almost to nothing from the cloud-wrapped cinder of Earth, solitary droplets where once a great fountain had streamed; and Ulos-Reišf stirred in her final drunkenness, crawling around her asteroid to scan the outer heavens for a young yellow star around which her præter-crystal eyes could detect the curdling of dust into suitable planets. When she found one, she launched herself into space, her long legs spread to catch one of the interstellar strands her race had laid in its youth, whereby she might hope to arrive at her newly chosen star in good time and find, perhaps, a planet already spuming souls.