Book One – Chapter 16

And now, in this new cocoon of death and venom, she felt it again.

The pulse.

The pull.

The truth of what she was.

This change was not an aberration. It was her nature.

The undoing of substance, the invasion, the breakdown, the remaking of her body by what was foreign — that was not a failure of her self, but the expression of it.

She was a living record of all she had consumed, a being that broke and rebuild itself, altered by every influence.

And so it was now.

The pains and processes now were no different than they had ever been. Poison, injected. Fluids, forced in. They made her wither, weaken, cramp, shiver at the edge of collapse.

But she was open.

She took it in —

to filter, to forge.

That act, the taking in, was reflex. Older than thought. Older than pain. Older than fear. The first and deepest instinct of the scorchborn.

And for most of her kind, it was enough. The common scorchborn sprouted in one place. They anchored in one stretch of swamp, where their roots sat in rich, nourishing soil for a lifetime. In such a vegetative life, they absorbed without thought. Substances were taken in at ground value — little to no filtering needed. The swamp fed them what they needed,  and while their bodies adapted to the slow rhythm of mud and water and rot, they grew into what the swamp made of them. Minor rejections, minor selections — a new twist of leaf here, a thickening of bark there, once in a while, a harmless sift of useless sediment — but mostly, the soil fed them well enough, and they adapted respectively.

Barbarthara was not that.

She had never been that.

When what entered her was nothing but poison – when it burned and strained and threatened to erase her – she had to resist that primal instinct to take all in. She had to filter, to actively select instead of passively internalising all that entered her.

That, she had learned from the Shaira.