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-------Did they know?
Did the weavers realise where she had gone?
-----------------How long would they remember?
Barbarthara felt them still, just beyond the layered walls of flesh and chitin.
The faint tremble of legs scraping over stone.
The low vibration of threads being spun, torn, spun anew.
The web grew denser around the fallen beast, enshrouding it with a purpose she could not read.
---Were they searching for her?
---------------Trapping her?
---------------------------Staking a claim?
-------Guarding?
---------------------------------------------- Mourning?
------------She could not say.
----Their intelligence was not like hers.
Alien.--------------Collective.----Practical.
The Shaira had spoken of it — how creatures born within the Albweiss were often defined by cohesion and distinguished as a collective, bound more by shared awareness than by self. Not only beasts, but even orks, to some extent. Their minds were not separate, their thoughts not singular. And sometimes, not even linear.
Amongst these beasts were the rockshade weavers. Their awareness was not singular, but shared, diffused across the clutch like a living net of instinct and intent. Their minds were netted together; a current of thought flowing across invisible strands that were their innate nature. They moved not with the wild reflexes of beasts, but with structure that came from this shared awareness — strange, evolving patterns born of synchrony. They learned from the unknown. They remembered disturbances. They mapped motions, recognised rhythms, and catalogued presences that passed through their dark. And they stitched those revelations into each other’s memories.
Like that, a clutch of weavers could tell when something foreign passed among them, something that did not belong, even if only one had made the actual physical observation. Only one of them might see or sense, but all of them would know. So if even one singular weaver had understood what Barbarthara was, or where she had gone, or that it was her who had moved the grand arachnid, then they all knew.
Still —
Not all beasts hunted with patience.
Not all lingered when their prey vanished beyond reach.
Many that swarmed with intention would scatter just as easily once the scent went cold; misled by impulse, or stilled by indifference.
It was possible.
------If Barbarthara waited long enough,
---------silent enough,
--small enough —
-------------------------------------------------------They might leave.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
------------------------------------------------------They might-leave her be.
-----------------------She hoped.
----------------But hope was thin.
---------------------------Thin and cornered by hallucinatory descent.
Inside the corpse, within the bulging, ruptured dark of the grand arachnid’s abdomen, there was no way to tell what was momentary awareness and what was memory and what was madness. Barbarthara was in a fever dream at the edge of annihilation and transcendence, with no way to know what was plan and what was delusional wishful thinking.
There was no guarantee they would forget. She might have vanished beyond their reach, but she was still inside their dead.
Barbarthara did not know what the weavers might seek in the corpse of the grand one. She only knew what the Shaira witches had taught her of the mountain’s twisted lifeforms, of their rites of venom and death.
Rockshade weavers did not devour their dead. They could not. Their venoms were not safe to their own kind. Each weaver crafted its own poison from within; precise, personal, and volatile compositions tailored before each strike, each blend with its own purpose — to paralyse, to torment, to soften flesh, to hasten decay, to mend wounds, to hollow a still-living host for the planting of eggs. They even weaponised it against each other.
Intention made the difference.
But once a weaver fell, once its body tore and its mind unravelled, that intention was lost. Withing the faltering body, the various venoms no longer held their boundaries. They broke down and bled into one another. They collapsed into a compost of every cruelty and hunger the creature had ever borne — an unstable deathblend with no purpose. Lethal, even to its kin.
And Barbarthara, buried in the grand arachnid’s abdomen, was soaked in it. The corrupted fluids oozed through her. Flooded every root. Seeped into her core. She could not stop it — She was a scorchborn. To absorb was her nature. To take in sustenance. To feed on the world and its creatures. It was the foundation of her existence, the marrow of her life. And now, it was the thing that would end her.
Barbarthara did not know what poison the weaver had chosen for her. What poison had pierced her flesh in that first strike.
But that had only been the beginning.
Now came everything.
Not one poison with purpose, but all of them.
The full volatile arsenal of the grand one – every compound it had ever crafted, every intention it had etched into its glands – now leaked from failing sacs and ruptured membranes. Bleeding out. Bleeding into her.
Her core could not seal.
Her intake could not stop.
Her self could not hold.
Barbarthara lay deep within the ruin of what had killed her — and what she had killed. And in that steaming cradle of pulp and venom, she gave in. The toxins flooded her. They made her senses swim and set her mind flickering at the edge of unconsciousness. And as her thoughts frayed, and her form spasmed and shivered and stretched toward something else,
Barbarthara did not fight it.
Because this was not only pain.
Not only poison.
---------This was change.
---And change meant life.
Barbarthara was not a being with a fixed design. She had no ideal body to protect and preserve, no pristine inner composition to stand against external influences, no singular blueprint to defend against corruption from the outside world. Unlike witches, unlike orks, unlike even arachnids, she existed only because she absorbed from that outside world. Because she took. Because she broke down what was foreign, and remade it as herself. She existed through that a constant current of sustenance.
And the world around her did not simply sustain her. Her various sources and hosts did not just keep her alive. They changed her.
Some things made her grow.
Some made her bloom.
Some made her supple, open, light.
Others made her brittle, dense. Unyielding.
The Shaira’s brews had brought her close to death more than once. Various potions, some laced with weaver poison, had made her crumple, had withered her down to her core. Parts of her had blackened and peeled away, flakes like dead bark. Her senses had flickered out. Sight, hearing, touch — gone for hours, sometimes days.
But nothing had killed her yet.
She had changed excessively, yes, too much, too often, and in diverging, even contradicting directions, but never into something she could not survive.
She had been barely a sapling when they took her. A rootling, small, pliable, unaware. Given over as payment, a living recompense for a wrong committed by her kind against theirs. A breach of the ancient pact between scorchborn and witch-blood. A debt paid in life.
She remembered almost nothing of the swamplands. Even less of the ones who had grown around her. Her true beginning, her conscious existence, had come not with her sprouting, but with her severing. Torn from the bed where her roots had first anchored. Ripped from the dark and familiar life that had nourished her unknowingly.
It was in the hands of the Shaira that Barbarthara first became aware. It was through them she learned to feel her own shape, to register the motion of her shifting mass. Through them, she learned the passing of time around her and the changing of tides within her, the patterns of what she consumed and what it made of her. It was with them that she grew a mind. A self.
And from that moment forward, change had been her only constant.
-
And now, in this new cocoon of death and venom, she felt it again.
The pulse.
The pull.
The truth of what she was.
This change was not an aberration. It was her nature.
The undoing of substance, the invasion, the breakdown, the remaking of her body by what was foreign — that was not a failure of her self, but the expression of it.
She was a living record of all she had consumed, a being that broke and rebuild itself, altered by every influence.
And so it was now.
The pains and processes now were no different than they had ever been. Poison, injected. Fluids, forced in. They made her wither, weaken, cramp, shiver at the edge of collapse.
But she was open.
She took it in —
to filter, to forge.
That act, the taking in, was reflex. Older than thought. Older than pain. Older than fear. The first and deepest instinct of the scorchborn.
And for most of her kind, it was enough. The common scorchborn sprouted in one place. They anchored in one stretch of swamp, where their roots sat in rich, nourishing soil for a lifetime. In such a vegetative life, they absorbed without thought. Substances were taken in at ground value — little to no filtering needed. The swamp fed them what they needed, and while their bodies adapted to the slow rhythm of mud and water and rot, they grew into what the swamp made of them. Minor rejections, minor selections — a new twist of leaf here, a thickening of bark there, once in a while, a harmless sift of useless sediment — but mostly, the soil fed them well enough, and they adapted respectively.
Barbarthara was not that.
She had never been that.
When what entered her was nothing but poison – when it burned and strained and threatened to erase her – she had to resist that primal instinct to take all in. She had to filter, to actively select instead of passively internalising all that entered her.
That, she had learned from the Shaira.
She had learned to separate what strengthened her from what would rot her. She did so through her lichen. Through her spores. Through the fine fungal lattice that was part of her, but never entirely of her. It was this living network that soaked up what entered, broke them down, sifted through, transformed what could nourish, and expelled the rest. As ooze. As mist. As cast-off spores curling into the air.
But now?
Now those filters were torn. Crushed under the collapsing masses around her. Melted into gammy, gluey mud. There was no space, no room to rebuild, no reach to grow outward, no way to vent. Only the narrowest of openings remained, slits in the remnants of disintegrated roots.
---------------Just enough
-------to try.
And worse, unlike ever before, what she expelled —
it had nowhere to go.
The arachnid’s insides pressed on her from every side. What she managed to expel, the remnants of rot and venom, clung to her. Coated her. Layered and turned her into thick, wet mush.
And still, she filtered.
And simultaneously, she fed.
The expelled poison became ooze.
The ooze was reabsorbed.
Her roots drank it again.
Filtered again.
Expelled again.
Over and over. A cycle of rot and refinement, ever changing masses pressed atop each other and ever again into her, layer by layer. Involuntarily. Unstoppable.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And all the while, she burrowed deeper into the dead body around her — feeding from the liquefying organs, the steaming pulp of tissue and venom around her.
She could
-----------not
--------------------------stop.
This was the process of change.
Filtering and expelling Death,
just to take it back in.
Growing from Death.
Growing through Death.
Not dying.
Becoming.
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It lasted for hours.
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