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.
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.
Then, movement.
A twitch.
A scrape.
The slow drag of a dead limb across s
It worked.
Barbarthara made the corpse move.
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.
Then, movement.
A twitch.
A scrape.
The slow drag
of a dead limb
across stone.
It worked.
Barbarthara
made the corpse move.
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.
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