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---------------Barbarthara threw herself sideways — without sound, without thought.
She did not see. Did not hear. But she felt. The trembling of threads. The tremor. The sudden buckling of tension —
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That raw, fibrous sensitivity saved her. The vibrations shot through the web like screams through bone. Something massive had entered the weave — And rushed for her.
She could not see its shape, but she felt the shadow roll over her. Felt its mass. Its speed. The sheer weight of it displacing the air like a landslide; a bulk that lunged from above, too large, too fast, twelve — no, fifteen times the mass of the ork.
The first strike came in silence. Two pincers, thick as tree trunks, closed around her mid-torso. Then — the mandibles. A clean, brutal bite. Her form split apart.
Barbarthara fell. The part that held her core.
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Barbarthara could be split – riven, shattered – and still exist, so long as her core, the condensed knot of root-flesh that made her her, remained intact. So long as that survived, and drew new sustenance, she could reform. She could regrow.
She tore through the threads beneath her, slipping between strands slickened by earlier secretions, but the deeper layers caught her again. Trapped. Scrambling. Half-mangled. Disoriented.
Barbarthara pulled herself across the thicker threads, scuttling downward into the deeper dark. Her form twisted, reforming with every movement. Roots flung outward to grip, to hook, to lash across the threads as she fled, all instincts and terror. She climbed, swung, jumped, dropped. Sap smeared across her. Too much fluids lost. But she did not stop. The net shivered behind her. The beast was following. Terrifyingly silent. It moved without sound — but she felt it. Even through the disorientation, through fraying cold and tearing pain, she felt its limbs brushing the silk, its weight shifting across strands right behind her, the shudders vibrating through her nerves. She felt its legs graze her — once, twice — near misses. Pincers swept past — missed by a strand.
She was not fast enough. With no second to pause, Barbarthara thrust herself forward and reached downward mid-flight —
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She flattened herself, pressed her core against the rock, pulled vulnerable nodes inward and aside, curled her being out of reach. She sought the stone – to vanish into it, to burrow and be gone – but the surface was unbroken. Flat. Unyielding. Seamless. Then — salvation. A crack. Barely wide enough. She slithered into it, pushed forth her core. Almost —
A leg found her. Barbed. Splintered. Curved like a thorned hook. It ripped her free, dragged her back into open ground. The mandibles drove down. They slammed into the rock, struck stone, struck into her, tore through root and rind. Barbarthara was ripped apart, segments crushed and trampled.
Desperation contorted her into unnatural shapes. If she could not sink below, she had to rise. Get off the ground. Barbarthara coiled around one of its legs, sought purchase, sought entry. But the limbs were dead — timber-thick, bloodless, fleshless. No softness. No soil.
Still, she climbed. She scraped along the underbelly, searching for softness, weakness, for something that gave way. At last — the abdomen. Swollen. Pulsing. She formed a thorn, hardened a root, narrowed it to a point, and drove it in. Met resistance. Dense chitin. She pushed harder. The tip pierced the shell. She forced venom into the breach — her own toxin, sharpened over years of learning from witches and weavers.
The beast thrashed wildly; no sign of affect, of weakness. Perhaps her poison had not reached flesh — if there was flesh. Most likely it had not struck anything vital. Surely, the creature could not be harmed by what little she had left to give.
No time to think. No time to try again. The arachnid twisted and flailed; Barbarthara could barely hold on. The mandibles struck again and again —
They got her. Closed around her. She felt the bite — a crushing, slicing pressure. She twisted, tried to pull her core aside. Too slow. One edge scraped into her core. The mandible drove through the dense node — that thick, fibrous knot of root and nerve from which she functioned. But it did not cleave her cleanly. She was not shattered. Not torn apart. She was pierced.
And then — something else. Not just pain. Not just trauma. Poison. Acidic and burning.
It rushed through her, sank deep, unravelling her from within. On instinct, Barbarthara retaliated — jammed her thorn deeper, tried to force her own venom into the chitin. Pushed with everything left.
Two beings of toxin, locked together in agony.
But only one was dying.
Barbarthara’s poison was weak, forced into an impenetrable shell. The arachnid’s venom corrosive, overwhelming. It flooded her. It came without ebb, without rhythm. It rooted itself in every thread of her being, every pulse, every synapse. It smothered her senses and suffocated her mind. It drowned her. The pain unmade her. There was no counter. Barbarthara had no will left to shape it and no shape she could hold. She could no longer climb. Could no longer strike. Could not run.
And the dark pressed in — silent, endless.
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She knew the inside of agony, the slow unravelling of a body from within. When nerves convulsed and screamed, when the self became a twitching vessel of venom and suffering.
She knew THE DARKNESS too — not the lightless depths that filled the mountain’s lungs, but the other darkness. The one that bloomed inside when everything withered and burned. The kind that screamed through nerves, that twisted every sense into madness when the venom seeped too deep.
The last decade of her life had been shaped by it, all that she was ever twisted by poison. Barbarthara had been bled into, bitten into, and drowned in toxins. Soaked, scorched, spell-ridden. The Shaira had made her a vessel for affliction. They had poured spells into her spine, venom into her veins, apparent medicines into her marrow, hexes into her head.
Hours. Days. Weeks.
Each time the choice: rot — -or grow.
And she had grown. From corrupted flesh, she had reformed. Sometimes crooked, but always harder.
She had chosen growth.
Always.
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Now, with Barbarthara’s resistance faltering, the beast had stopped thrashing. Its massive head pressed down onto her, pinning her against its abdomen. The mandibles still clutched her. She could not move. Could barely think. But she needed to grow. She still needed to grow.
From the pulped centre of her bisected form, a single root responded. Right from the wound the creature had carved into her, the root shot upward — hard, honed, instinctive. It surged between the mandibles and stuck the softest place it could find; Barbarthara drove right into the open maw, where the flesh was wet and yielding.
From the outside, the creature had been impenetrable. All armour, all chitin plate. But inside —inside was meat. Inside was soft. The root slid into its mouth and did not stop. It squelched past fangs and twitching taste-organs, twisting its way through the throat and upwards, right up into the head. She rammed her way into the brain. The root filled. Pressed. Pushed. Crushed. Pulped. Smashed through tissue and nerves and thought. Not with precision — with ruin. She ruptured flesh that had never known intrusion. She tore matter never meant to be touched. There was no exit wound. No clean strike. She did not pierce the skull. She scrambled what was within.
The beast spasmed. Its mandibles clamped in death-throes. They bit off her root and severed the piece of Barbarthara where they had pierced her core. The pain was unbearable. But the damage was done.
The grand arachnid shuddered and stiffened.
Twitched once more.
Then it collapsed.
Its carcass crashed down over her broken body, limbs flailing and then coiling inwards with the last remnants of chaos and false life. The mind behind them was gone. Nerve-dead. Obliterated from within.
Barbarthara lay buried somewhere beneath the head and the massive abdomen. Torn apart. Ripped open. Poisoned.
But alive.
She was still alive.
And it was not.
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The corpse above her was still.
Her own body, less so.
It seeped, it leaked, it spilled from her mangled trunk. Her own sap and secretions mingled with the dense mass of foreign venom. The breach ran deep.
She tried to seal herself, to close the webwork of her own body, to connect the torn roots into new channels, but control slipped from her grasp. She had no matter to make up for all she lost, for all she was losing still — there was no cohesion. She was reduced too far. The remaining filaments drained. Siphoned. Hollow.
She could not see. Could not hear. Her senses had frayed. Where once she felt the world through the brush of air on bark and the shudder of stone beneath root, there was now only static —
Still, to the side, something. A piece of herself. A clutch of network-roots, cleaved-off, severed in the struggle, still embedded in the corpse’s webbing. Barbarthara reached for it with what remained of her internal network, sending slivers of her essence crawling, creeping, convulsing to rejoin what was hers, but the connection would not take. She had lost all fine control over her body to build new ties, and the detached root had gone cold. Lifeless. Gone.
There was no form to regain. Only distortion. Only rupture. The change had already infested her — unsought, unstoppable, irreversible. It burned through her like a forest fire.
There was no more resistance from Barbarthara. No command, just the collapse of form and the sick spreading of heat that was burning and becoming her. Convulsions shook her. Cramping. Curling. She felt her composition shift and her core coming apart. The poison fire turned her tissue and nerves into liquefied mush. Memory to melt. Her body was no longer hers. She was not shaping it. It was shaping her.
And it screamed. The body screamed. Barbarthara screamed as the poison sang.
Still — she held it. She held it in.
Let it spread and burrow and twist and burn through even her deepest parts. Let it carve paths into her broken self and break her even more. Let it plant something else inside.
She had done this before. Taken in things not meant to be taken. She had eaten rot. Grown from soot. Birthed herself out of fire, curses and poisons over and over again.
This was not different.
She would hold this one, too.
Bear it.
Become it.
Whatever it was.
There would be a new self after the unmaking.
There always was.
But before she could become —
------Others came to claim.
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