Barbarthara threw herself sideways — without sound, without thought.
She did not see. Did not hear. But she felt. The trembling of threads. The tremor. The sudden buckling of tension —
– ‘ MOVEM,ENTS NOT -. , HER OWN ` -. .
That raw, fibrous sensitivity saved her. The vibrations shot through the web like screams through bone. Something massive had entered the weave — And rushed for her.
She could not see its shape, but she felt the shadow roll over her. Felt its mass. Its speed. The sheer weight of it displacing the air like a landslide; a bulk that lunged from above, too large, too fast, twelve — no, fifteen times the mass of the ork.
The first strike came in silence. Two pincers, thick as tree trunks, closed around her mid-torso. Then — the mandibles. A clean, brutal bite. Her form split apart.
Barbarthara fell. The part that held her core.
She was not dead.
Barbarthara could be split – riven, shattered – and still exist, so long as her core, the condensed knot of root-flesh that made her her, remained intact. So long as that survived, and drew new sustenance, she could reform. She could regrow.
She tore through the threads beneath her, slipping between strands slickened by earlier secretions, but the deeper layers caught her again. Trapped. Scrambling. Half-mangled. Disoriented.
Barbarthara pulled herself across the thicker threads, scuttling downward into the deeper dark. Her form twisted, reforming with every movement. Roots flung outward to grip, to hook, to lash across the threads as she fled, all instincts and terror. She climbed, swung, jumped, dropped. Sap smeared across her. Too much fluids lost. But she did not stop. The net shivered behind her. The beast was following. Terrifyingly silent. It moved without sound — but she felt it. Even through the disorientation, through fraying cold and tearing pain, she felt its limbs brushing the silk, its weight shifting across strands right behind her, the shudders vibrating through her nerves. She felt its legs graze her — once, twice — near misses. Pincers swept past — missed by a strand.
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