Book One – Chapter 14

The name of said destiny was Barbarthara.

Unbeknown to Nagrak, he had not stumbled upon Barbarthara because of divine calling, nor because he was chosen for some grand purpose. No, his discovery was embarrassingly mundane; a statistical consequence of his chronic clumsiness. A creature of perpetual stumbles, he could only trip over so many rocks, roots, and corpses before he would eventually stumble over something extraordinary. Be it a wizard’s staff, an artefact of power, or, in this case, a withering scorchborn — chance, not fate, had brought them together.

Barbarthara could not survive without an energy source. She needed constant rooting, an anchor from which to draw sustenance, and there was only so much to gain from the dead scattered around her. Since losing the wizard, she had dwindled. She was withering, starving, freezing, her once-thriving form reduced to a husk. The intricate lattice of lichen, roots, and fungi that had adorned her body was now compressed into a dense, knotted core. She had reduced herself into a survival state, her head buried deep within this twisted mass, cocooned in a failing attempt to conserve the last shreds of energy and long-lost warmth.

She had hoped to endure long enough for a beast or traveller to come close enough. But the cold had seeped into her core, numbing her senses and paralysing her. She was dying, frozen and inert, when chance delivered her the runt.

His touch jolted her back into awareness, a shock so sudden it sent ripples of terror through her form. Her body reacted instinctively; sheer panic turned into a surge of relief as she burrowed into him.

The witches had fed Barbarthara on both orks and wizards before. She knew how to extract from them without outright killing them — at least, not immediately. As her roots bore into the runt’s arm, they spread like threads, thinning into filaments that wove their way beneath his skin. They latched onto his veins and his flesh. She drew with ravenous urgency, pulling greedily at everything she could reach: liquids, nutrients, all that would be energy, life and growth for her.