This was not a feeding.
It was a process borne from memory.
A ritual. Almost like — Almost like the Shaira, with their so many beasts and bindings.
Something in Barbarthara knew. She did not see them. Could not name them. But still, she grasped what they were. This knowing did not come from within her mind but into it, like a drip of dark understanding into still water. It was not hers, not entirely. It came with the poison. With the shift within. With her transformation. With the breach that had opened inside her. And there, a soaking, budding seed had settled that could not be scotched or stifled. And from it, knowledge sprouted — the quiet, invasive comprehension of the darkness she had fallen into.
They were not hunting, not preying upon her. They were identifying. Sorting her. Parsing. Stripping. Extracting. They knew the dark, their dark, the weave and rhythm of its depth, and when they sensed what did not belong, they dismembered it. They purified.
She was a flattened smear beneath the carcass of the grand arachnid, her form dissolved into molten mess. Still, they deconstructed her further. Bit by bit, they stripped her down to her rawest matter. Years of growth, patient shaping, all devoured. What remained of her was barely a seedling’s worth of substance. An exposed, poison-flooded core.
No defense.
No retreat.
No escape.
Barbarthara pressed herself against the underside of the chitinous corpse above, but the mandibles still found her. They darted in, drew back, came again, each strike a measured theft, another fraction of her being stolen away.
Despite the chaos within her, Barbarthara felt the pattern and purpose behind their movements. The clarity terrified her.
It was like the horde.
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