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.
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