Book One – Chapter 16

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.