Did they know?
Did the weavers realise where she had gone?
How long would they remember?
Barbarthara felt them still, just beyond the layered walls of flesh and chitin.
The faint tremble of legs scraping over stone.
The low vibration of threads being spun, torn, spun anew.
The web grew denser around the fallen beast, enshrouding it with a purpose she could not read.
Were they searching for her?
Trapping her?
Staking a claim?
Guarding?
Mourning?
She could not say.
Their intelligence was not like hers.
Alien. Collective. Practical.
The Shaira had spoken of it — how creatures born within the Albweiss were often defined by cohesion and distinguished as a collective, bound more by shared awareness than by self. Not only beasts, but even orks, to some extent. Their minds were not separate, their thoughts not singular. And sometimes, not even linear.
Amongst these beasts were the rockshade weavers. Their awareness was not singular, but shared, diffused across the clutch like a living net of instinct and intent. Their minds were netted together; a current of thought flowing across invisible strands that were their innate nature. They moved not with the wild reflexes of beasts, but with structure that came from this shared awareness — strange, evolving patterns born of synchrony. They learned from the unknown. They remembered disturbances. They mapped motions, recognised rhythms, and catalogued presences that passed through their dark. And they stitched those revelations into each other’s memories.
Like that, a clutch of weavers could tell when something foreign passed among them, something that did not belong, even if only one had made the actual physical observation. Only one of them might see or sense, but all of them would know. So if even one singular weaver had understood what Barbarthara was, or where she had gone, or that it was her who had moved the grand arachnid, then they all knew.
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