Still —
Not all beasts hunted with patience.
Not all lingered when their prey vanished beyond reach.
Many that swarmed with intention would scatter just as easily once the scent went cold; misled by impulse, or stilled by indifference.
It was possible.
If Barbarthara waited long enough,
silent enough,
small enough —
They might leave.
They might leave her be.
She hoped.
But hope was thin.
Thin and cornered by hallucinatory descent.
Inside the corpse, within the bulging, ruptured dark of the grand arachnid’s abdomen, there was no way to tell what was momentary awareness and what was memory and what was madness. Barbarthara was in a fever dream at the edge of annihilation and transcendence, with no way to know what was plan and what was delusional wishful thinking.
There was no guarantee they would forget. She might have vanished beyond their reach, but she was still inside their dead.
Barbarthara did not know what the weavers might seek in the corpse of the grand one. She only knew what the Shaira witches had taught her of the mountain’s twisted lifeforms, of their rites of venom and death.
Rockshade weavers did not devour their dead. They could not. Their venoms were not safe to their own kind. Each weaver crafted its own poison from within; precise, personal, and volatile compositions tailored before each strike, each blend with its own purpose — to paralyse, to torment, to soften flesh, to hasten decay, to mend wounds, to hollow a still-living host for the planting of eggs. They even weaponised it against each other.
Intention made the difference.
But once a weaver fell, once its body tore and its mind unravelled, that intention was lost. Withing the faltering body, the various venoms no longer held their boundaries. They broke down and bled into one another. They collapsed into a compost of every cruelty and hunger the creature had ever borne — an unstable deathblend with no purpose. Lethal, even to its kin.
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