In return for what she took, Barbarthara made him compliant. Her roots secreted subtle enzymes, chemicals that softened his resistance, dulled his pain, and lulled his senses into a haze of euphoric submission. The runt did not recoil, did not fight. He simply stood, his body trembling as the warmth and pleasure consumed him.

He was so much easier to subdue than the wizard had been. Salgier had been defiant to the last. The runt, this malleable, dull-witted ork, showed no such strength, lacking the cunning or resolve that had defined her previous host. He was weak, dim, and small in every way that mattered. Yet in his simplicity lay opportunity. She had seen the orks of this mountain before — their endurance, their ferocity, their connection to the cold and stone. If this runt was even a shadow of that strength, he might prove useful. He could be reasoned with, guided, manipulated. A vessel, a path off this cursed mountain and toward survival. But reason and subtlety would have to wait. Barbathera felt her filaments tightening, siphoning, as she drew from him for dear life, all of it channelled into the withering mass that was her core.

As she regained life, her thoughts drifted to those who had lost theirs in their failed escape. They had been a band of refugees, arbitrary in their unity, bound together by circumstance, desperation, and fleeting purpose. They had been prisoners, captured or coerced by the Shaira. Some, like Barbathera, the wizard, and his avian familiar, had endured years of servitude and slavery, their bodies and essence subjected to the Shaira’s abhorrent experiments. Others, like the voltera, had been new arrivals, their chains barely forged before they had been cast into the doomed bid for freedom.

Barbarthara had been both a tool and a subject in the Shaira’s experiments. For years, they had used her for their grotesque ambitions, twisting magics to influence and manipulate the bodies of other beings. Magic that forged overpowering new forms. Magic that stripped essence from others or imbued it into empty vessels. Barbarthara had borne witness to unspeakable horrors inflicted upon captives, both wizards and beasts alike. She had done nothing to stop it — could do nothing to stop it. To survive in that place had demanded obedience. To endure meant to comply. Survivors lived on silence. Even now, there was nothing she could do for those that had remained, nor for those that had escaped with her — not if she did not survive.

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