I regret it now…swallowing those sleeping pills…though to be honest, I never expected to wake up to this. My concept of the Afterlife had been more of the Paradise or Hades variety…I thought I'd either end up floating on some fluffy cloud...or burning in eternal torment...either way, I figured, it had to be better than the life I was living at the time. I was stupid, I was selfish, I realize that now...because never, in my wildest dreams, could I have ever conceived the madness, the sheer depravity, in which I now found myself immersed.

Angels, Demons, Shifters, Were-Creatures, Zombies, Vampires, all sorts of other creatures like you wouldn’t believe! Everywhere I turned, there they were…not a single “normal” human in the bunch! You might be able to imagine my horror when I found out I was no different from them! …A Changeling, they call me and others like me…"one able to take on the form of one animal – real or imagined - for an indefinite amount of time" was how one phrased it. And the form I was given? A spider. A spider! And not something dangerous like a black widow or a brown recluse…not even one remotely interesting to look at like a yellow-orb spider, oh no…No, instead, I was given the form of an ugly, plain brown arachnid…the type easily squashed, the type that posed no threat, the type no one ever really cares about. Better, I think, to have been something else, like, oh, I don’t know…a hamster…at least then I would have been able to take comfort in the fact that I was cute! Not that I had any say in the matter; no one does.

And then, there are the abilities…gifts…powers…whatever you want to call them…Apparently everyone gets them…and some of them are downright vicious! Being able to incinerate someone just by looking at them, to make them into your own personal puppet….to inflict eternal torment on your victim – not that you need to here…but still, pretty nifty! Even the ones that aren’t like that aren’t so bad…like being able to summon oddly colored butterflies that...that...mesmerize all who look at them except for the one who summoned them, or the ability to create the most beautiful flowers the world's never even seen, for no other reason than to have a bit of beauty in this hell – though I think even Hell would be better than this place…Endless possibilities, and what did I get? The ability to create silver threads…just like those of a spider…unlike a spider’s thread though, they’re proving to be pretty worthless…can’t even trap a measly bug…Utterly useless! Talk about adding insult to injury…

So here I am, a weakling, a nobody…in a place where being so is like a death sentence…that is, of course,it would be if we weren't already dead. The question is, what's going to happen to me now?