Book One – Chapter 16

Now, with Barbarthara’s resistance faltering, the beast had stopped thrashing. Its massive head pressed down onto her, pinning her against its abdomen. The mandibles still clutched her. She could not move. Could barely think. But she needed to grow. She still needed to grow.

From the pulped centre of her bisected form, a single root responded. Right from the wound the creature had carved into her, the root shot upward — hard, honed, instinctive. It surged between the mandibles and stuck the softest place it could find; Barbarthara drove right into the open maw, where the flesh was wet and yielding.

From the outside, the creature had been impenetrable. All armour, all chitin plate. But inside —inside was meat. Inside was soft. The root slid into its mouth and did not stop. It squelched past fangs and twitching taste-organs, twisting its way through the throat and upwards, right up into the head. She rammed her way into the brain. The root filled. Pressed. Pushed. Crushed. Pulped. Smashed through tissue and nerves and thought. Not with precision — with ruin. She ruptured flesh that had never known intrusion. She tore matter never meant to be touched. There was no exit wound. No clean strike. She did not pierce the skull. She scrambled what was within.

The beast spasmed. Its mandibles clamped in death-throes. They bit off her root and severed the piece of Barbarthara where they had pierced her core. The pain was unbearable. But the damage was done.

The grand arachnid shuddered and stiffened.

Twitched once more.

Then it collapsed.

Its carcass crashed down over her broken body, limbs flailing and then coiling inwards with the last remnants of chaos and false life. The mind behind them was gone. Nerve-dead. Obliterated from within.

Barbarthara lay buried somewhere beneath the head and the massive abdomen. Torn apart. Ripped open. Poisoned.

But alive. 

She was still alive.

And it was not.