-
-
-
-
-
-
The dark stirred.
They came before the pain had even settled into shape.
She heard them first. Not one singular sound — but a texture, layered and converging. Skittering limbs rasping stone, friction gathering into cadence. A dry hairline rustle filled the air, like a ripple of claws combing the cavern floor. It was a sweeping, swelling gust scratching and searching the surface, a sound sharp and constant. A low, skimming, soaring storm; the movement of masses in motion.
She felt them. Legs brushing against the corpse above her. Fast bodies flittering past, across, around; friction without discernible form. The air turned thick with stale vibration, hissing with their pace. Pressure without weight. Whispers without voices. The cave began to breathe to their rhythm as the swarm filled it.
Then came the strands.
She felt them as they flung — fine, adhesive filaments snapping across the mound of chitin and ruin that pinned her down. They came from every direction, not woven but cast. They passed over her, under her, around the whole grand arachnid, looping, binding, enveloping. Net over net the network grew, slow at first, then with the frantic precision of instinct. Lines pulled taut, stitching chaos into design. A pattern. An architecture. Barbarthara recognised the structure; meant to hold the carcass — meant to shape it. Cage it. Cage her.
The first touch landed like a tooth.
Then another.
And another.
Sharp, swift stabs. Pinpoints, then hooks. Not tearing yet — testing.
And then, the first bite. Mandibles snapped against the grand arachnid’s abdomen, pressing past the mass to reach her. They did not gouge. They took. A swift incision. A clean removal. A segment gone from her flank. Another followed. Then more. One after the other, they darted in. Felt. Sought. Found her. Segments of her pulped and softened tissue were pierced, seized, severed, and dragged away before she could brace against the loss. Sap streamed. Tissue dimmed. Her every attempt to rebind, to regrow, was met with new violations, her every rethreading interrupted mid-pulse. From beneath the carcass, from every angle, dismemberment —
But not as attack. They were methodical. A swarm with structure. But not cruel. Not even aggressive. Purposeful.
This was not a feeding.
It was a process borne from memory.
A ritual. Almost like — Almost like the Shaira, with their so many beasts and bindings.
Something in Barbarthara knew. She did not see them. Could not name them. But still, she grasped what they were. This knowing did not come from within her mind but into it, like a drip of dark understanding into still water. It was not hers, not entirely. It came with the poison. With the shift within. With her transformation. With the breach that had opened inside her. And there, a soaking, budding seed had settled that could not be scotched or stifled. And from it, knowledge sprouted — the quiet, invasive comprehension of the darkness she had fallen into.
They were not hunting, not preying upon her. They were identifying. Sorting her. Parsing. Stripping. Extracting. They knew the dark, their dark, the weave and rhythm of its depth, and when they sensed what did not belong, they dismembered it. They purified.
She was a flattened smear beneath the carcass of the grand arachnid, her form dissolved into molten mess. Still, they deconstructed her further. Bit by bit, they stripped her down to her rawest matter. Years of growth, patient shaping, all devoured. What remained of her was barely a seedling’s worth of substance. An exposed, poison-flooded core.
-------No defense.
---No retreat.
--------------No escape.
Barbarthara pressed herself against the underside of the chitinous corpse above, but the mandibles still found her. They darted in, drew back, came again, each strike a measured theft, another fraction of her being stolen away.
Despite the chaos within her, Barbarthara felt the pattern and purpose behind their movements. The clarity terrified her.
-----It was like the horde.
The memory struck Barbarthara not as thought, but as sensation, a flood of heat and rhythm. The voltera, encircled by the Haraak. The way they swarmed, surged, withdrew, and returned in waves; spears stabbing and tearing in precise coordination. Not war — a pattern.
It was here. It moved through her now as the limbs struck. The same ebb and return. Not driven by rage, but by rhythm. The same pattern. The same precision. Like the voltera, she was trapped.
Memory and venom tangled. Images bled. Reality became liquid, slipped between her broken roots, as the illusions filled the darkness, swarmed over the carcass and all around her. Time twisted. They were here, they were then, they were inside her, flickering images of the Haraak. Barbarthara could not tell the living from the dead, the real from the conjured.
---------------------There was still one way.
-------------------------Her panic narrowed.
------------------------------------Her fear became purpose.
----------------She constricted and compressed.
----------Twisted the ragged ruin of herself around her core,
--------------------sap-slick filaments binding in overlapping coils,
------layers of tension pulled taut.
------------Then she moved.
------------------------Crawled. Climbed.
----------------------------------------------------She climbed the inside of Death.
----Upward, across the wet underside of the fallen beast. Over the slick, segmented head. The mandibles were still locked tight — no entry there. So she pressed lower, toward the midsection, the plated trunk that merged the head with the bloated abdomen. The grand body was slack. The tension of rage and resistance had gone. It had settled in death. Now, it was just flesh and weight. She searched by feel, dragging her mass along its curve until —
--------Yes!
A faint seam of tissue where armor met need. A juncture built of sinew and flex. The hinge.
She knew the pattern and placement. She recognised it through touch alone, through memory. If this beast, from all Barbarthara felt, was indeed a grand variant of the rockshade weavers, then this would be the flexible mid-section that gave the creature control of its body, the leg cluster, the fulcrum of balance and motion.
There.
She broke in. Pierced and pushed past the outer armour. Slid her slick mass through the softened sinew. Pressed inward.
And still, they pursued. Behind her, the smallest of weavers still followed, mandibles snapping, pulling at her trailing mass, and stripping strands from her back, and tearing sap-wet tissue of her edges.
But Barbarthara pressed deeper. Compressed herself into denser form. Let go of mass she could no longer protect. Let it slough off behind her like a husk. The opening tore wider. She forced her way through it. The membrane split. The tissue parted. And she slipped in, wholly, messily, into the body of the thing that had nearly ended her.
It would now shield her.
----Or swallow her.
-------------------Were they still following?
------------ Would they reach her through the flesh?
----------------------------Barbarthara did not know.
--------------------She could not distinguish the masses that pressed down onto her.
She wormed forward. Dragged herself through pulped internals, through collapsed organs, past slimy sacks and blistered tracts and chambers thick with digestion. Fluids sloshed around her, coated her, saturated what was left of her form and drowned her senses.
But still, she moved. Not with the certainty of survival, not even towards it – that was long past reason; decaying hope – but with the refusal to die. Motion was the only thing that kept her from the lasting stillness. In stillness, the darkness clung. With her body gone, this will was the only thing that remained; the core conviction that drove her forward. And so, she pressed inward. Parted tissue. Shoved viscera aside. Behind her, the path clogged — slack organs, thick fluids, her own secretions sealing the gap.
She was inside now.
The great beast held her.
Sealed her.
---------Became a sheltering cocoon.
Or her tomb.
-
------------------------------------Barbarthara collapsed.
-
The poison pulsed through her — hot, biting, raw. Her roots were too reduced, her form too ruined to filter it. But perhaps that was why she could still move — because she could not resist. Because she let the fire inside her run free. It was the sheer saturation. The panic that outpaced death. It carried her forward. It pushed her past the point of perish, into something else.
Inside the beast, Barbarthara reached. She sought the legs. If this beast was anything like the lesser rockshade weavers, the limbs would be — Yes. There. Structural tubes. Pressure vessels. Solid from the outside, but within — a passage. Hollow channels she could fill.
She drove herself into two of them. Roots like javelins into old wood, splitting what was already rotting. There was no precision. No finesse. She had neither the time nor the focus to tap into the faltering nervous system. It did not matter. She did not need the beast to live, she only needed its limbs to respond. And Barbarthara knew how they worked — pressure, leverage, jointed geometry.
She stretched herself dangerously thin – two roots drawn taut through emptiness, sap slicking the walls of the dead channels – until she reached the joint pivots.
------------------------------------------------Then, movement.
-------------------------A twitch.
----------------------------------------------------------------------A scrape.
-
------------------------------The slow drag of a dead limb across stone.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It worked.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Barbarthara made the corpse move.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Not walk, nothing so graceful.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But grind.
-
---------------Plant
-------------------------Drag
-----Anchor
-
----------------------------------------Pull
-
-----------------------------One leg.
----------------------------------Then the other.
-------It was a crude marionette act from within a cadaver,
every motion a splintering act of will.
--Every shift, agony. Her concentration narrowed to a pinprick —
----the cruel choreography of a parasite hauling a ruined frame through a killing ground.
-------She dragged.
-Pushed. Pulled.
-----Heaved. Hauled.
-The body jerked forward in fits.
-----Staggered. Slid. Sagged.
-
-------Until —
------------------Stone.
-
The beast’s heavy head collided with the cavern wall. Once. Again. She forced it upward, rocking the weight against the slope, using her borrowed limbs to jam the skull into place. The abdomen dragged, tilted. The soft midsection bent.
-----Folded.
-Squeezed.
-----------Then settled.
The path beneath the head – her only entrance – now lay crumpled against the stone.
----Flattened. Sealed shut. Hidden.
From the outside, the grand arachnid might even pass for the imitation of life.
-----------------Slumped. Resting. Waiting.
-------------------------------------------------------Inside, Barbarthara went still.
-----------------------------------------------Not safe.
------------------------------------------------------Not saved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Not whole.
----------------------------But hidden.
-------------------------------For now.
-
-
-
-
--
