...and makes a shocking discovery

She awoke cradled in darkness.

At first she didn't know where she was. Her memories of the battle mingled with fading images: a cave, a great stone room... a wooden cabin? They made no sense, jumbled as they were, so she discarded them. She had to focus on much more immediate things.

Like the pain. There was a lot of that. Her chest ached, and her breath rattled when she tried to draw in a lungful. Below that, her stomach felt terribly bruised. Her face felt partially numb, and her hands were stiff. She tried to stretch and was surprised to find her movement arrested. She closed her eyes, then opened them again; there was no change in the darkness all around her. So was she blind? Or just bound?

She found that she could move her arms. It felt as though they were moving through treacle, but she could flex them forward and back. As she did, she heard a faint tearing sound, like cloth ripping. Her movements became smoother. She reached one arm up towards her face, and after a minute of straining and grunting, she managed to lift it. As she did, the darkness was broken by a single, horizontal bar of faint grey light.

So. She was swaddled in something, and her arms could tear it away.

Now that she realized that, it was easier going. She worked slowly, methodically. Her legs didn't seem to want to listen to her, but her arms were strong, and they tore through the wrapping around her like thick taffy. It fell away in strips, and soon she had enough light to see by. She was cocooned in silk. She wondered why.

She paused to try and recall the battle. She could remember the golden light... the wings... the shadow-wolves, and the armored drow... there had been a sorcerer of some kind, hadn't there? A vile walking corpse? She had struck him down, and then...

The arrows. She shuddered at the memory. One in the chest and one in the stomach, each a mortal wound in itself. How had she survived that?

There was a strange buzzing in her thoughts, a sort of itch in the back of her brain. It felt very much like the sensation of pins and needles she would get if she fell asleep on her arm, but it was linked to no body part she could identify. She felt slightly nauseous, as though seasick. She had to free herself, then she could ask the Matron what had happened.

She set to tearing loose the silk. Strands fell around her like snowflakes. In the dim light of the cave, her skin looked grey and unwell. Had she been poisoned? Was that why she felt so strange and sick? She tore through one more ribbon and fell forward, landing heavily on the cave floor. The impact knocked the wind out of her, and she fell into a coughing fit. She struggled to rise to her feet. For some reason, this presented her with a surprising amount of trouble. She finally looked down and gasped.

Her skin, previously a healthy pink, had faded to slate-grey. She was naked, and she could see every detail of her sculpted abdomen. Below that, where her legs had been, the flesh of her torso fused into a mass of thick black chitin. Eight segmented legs tangled beneath her. As she watched in revolted horror, they twitched and skittered as though they had a mind of their own. She tried to fling herself forward, to crawl away from this abomination, but only succeeded in dragging it across the floor with her. She raked her fingers across her hips, trying to pull herself free, to sever herself from the hideous alien graft, but to no avail. She succeeded only in opening a cluster of shallow cuts in her skin which began to ooze black ichor. She cried out at the pain and withdrew her hands as if scalded. Her fingertips had been fused into sharp points, and she stared at them with her mouth open.

From somewhere a million miles away a woman was shouting her name. Or was that in her mind? Her head spun. Her gorge rose and she retched onto the floor. Her stomach was empty and all she managed was a watery spatter of bile. Her stomach twisted with renewed nausea.

Exhausted, she slumped to the floor and let out a low moan. If this had been the price of survival it was too high. She lay there, curled up into a ball, lacking the strength to stand or even to look at herself. Alone in the darkness, she wept.