Book One – Chapter 16

The memory struck Barbarthara not as thought, but as sensation, a flood of heat and rhythm. The voltera, encircled by the Haraak. The way they swarmed, surged, withdrew, and returned in waves; spears stabbing and tearing in precise coordination. Not war — a pattern.

It was here. It moved through her now as the limbs struck. The same ebb and return. Not driven by rage, but by rhythm. The same pattern. The same precision. Like the voltera, she was trapped.

Memory and venom tangled. Images bled. Reality became liquid, slipped between her broken roots, as the illusions filled the darkness, swarmed over the carcass and all around her. Time twisted. They were here, they were then, they were inside her, flickering images of the Haraak. Barbarthara could not tell the living from the dead, the real from the conjured.

_{She  pani}ck_ed.

                      _She  _{had to  g}et  o_{ut, to flee,  to} lash —

                                                                                               _but  w_here?
                                                                                   _Where  c_{ould she go}?

                                                                               Th_{ey  we}re  eve_rywhere.

                                 To^{uching  h}er  fr_{om all  si}des,
                                                       ^probin^g  her ro_ots,

                                      p_ushing  int_{o her  tru}nk,
                                                    bursting _her senses.

                              No o_pening.

                                    ^No a_ir.

                                      N_{o  p}ath _—

        
                                                              Except one.

                                                               There was still one way.

                                  Her panic narrowed.
                                                  Her fear became purpose.

                        She constricted and compressed.
                              Twisted the ragged ruin of herself around her core,
                          sap-slick filaments binding in overlapping coils,
           layers of tension pulled taut.

                Then she moved.
                     Crawled. Climbed.

                                     She climbed the inside of Death.

   Upward, across the wet underside of the fallen beast. Over the slick, segmented head. The mandibles were still locked tight — no entry there. So she pressed lower, toward the midsection, the plated trunk that merged the head with the bloated abdomen. The grand body was slack. The tension of rage and resistance had gone. It had settled in death. Now, it was just flesh and weight. She searched by feel, dragging her mass along its curve until —

        Yes!

A faint seam of tissue where armor met need. A juncture built of sinew and flex. The hinge.