The first secondary limb dropped from the ceiling and caught a soldier around the upper arm and shoulder. Its cluster of small fingers spread across the man and pulled in different directions at once.

The shoulder came apart with a wet crack, forced open from four points simultaneously. The soldier screamed, pitched sideways, and the appendage lifted him off the floor, three feet up, his boots kicking at empty air.

"Get him down! Get him down!"

Two soldiers drove their swords into the appendage’s base where it joined the main limb. The membrane split, and the appendage fell away.

The soldier hit the floor and did not rise again. His right arm had been bent into an ungodly direction. He was breathing. That was the full extent of the good news.

A second limb swept low across the floor, faster than the first, its surface sliding against the stone as it moved. Sig had no sword, his had snapped earlier, and he had been retreating when the appendage found his legs.

The small fingers closed around his left calf from four sides and pulled apart. The skin split. The muscle beneath split. He dropped at once, and the scream he made was not a word.

"Sig!"

A soldier slashed horizontally across the appendage’s length. The membrane opened and the fingers lost their hold.

Another soldier grabbed Sig by the collar and dragged him toward the left wall. Sig’s left leg trailed behind him while it let out bloody marks on the floor.

A third limb lifted off the upper surface of the main limb and reached across the room toward the retreating militia. It caught the rearmost soldier, not by the head, but by around the throat.

The fingers pressed inward from several directions. His hands went to the appendage and pulled. His face changed color in seconds.

Beorn stood against the right wall watching it happen, and his orders came a beat late to every reach because six appendages were moving at once and the militia had eight swords between thirteen men, which meant the numbers did not work.

"Left!" he shouted.

"Keep moving left!"

The soldier with the appendage around his throat had stopped pulling at the membrane. His hands dropped.

Harr drove his sword through the appendage with one functional arm, putting all his weight behind the strike. The membrane split deep, and the grip loosened. The soldier dropped to his hands and knees and stayed there.

The main limb was still advancing. Every few inches brought more of its body into the library and put more secondary limbs within reach of the militia. The eyes across its upper surface moved independently.

Some tracked individual soldiers. One tracked Beorn. One tracked Aestrith.

She was still at the far wall.

Beorn looked at her. Her face was drained white. But she was staring at the main limb with the expression she used when she was weighing something against what she had left.

Then she walked to the center of the library floor.

"Move everyone left," she said. "Against the wall. Now."

Her voice was flat in the way it was when she had already made the decision. Beorn repeated it before he had fully understood it.

"Left wall! Everyone!"

He swept one arm toward the wall. "Against the wall, move!"

Godric drove the movement without needing to hear it twice. The militia pushed to the left wall. The secondary limbs that had been tracking them shifted with the movement.

She stopped at the center of the floor, the main limb ten feet ahead of her and three secondary limbs between them. She raised her hands at her sides.

The gravity field came down directly onto the limb, the main mass and every secondary appendage it carried. Aestrith’s maximum power focused on a single target, and the effect was immediate and plain.

The secondary limbs dropped. They fought against the gravity , their membranes twisting under the force, but their tips lowered toward the floor and their reach shortened. The main limb sank four inches.

Then they began to thrash.

The two nearest secondary limbs swung toward her. The field forced their tips down, but their bases still had room to move. One came in from the right, driving horizontally at her face, the small fingers spread.

Harr stepped into its path with his one working arm and took the hit across his bad forearm, the fingers closing around bone. He drove his sword through the appendage’s midpoint. The fingers released. The bone cracked.

A second limb drove toward her midsection from below, sliding along the floor and rising in the last two feet. Beorn had no sword and no time. He threw himself sideways into its path and drove his shoulder into the membrane at the end of the appendage. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The fingers caught his coat and the skin beneath and pulled. Three points tore on his arm before Godric’s sword came through the appendage midpoint and the fingers let go.

Aestrith did not look at either of them. She increased the pressure.

The main limb sank farther, now six inches below its previous position. Every eye turned toward her at once. It was looking at her with all of itself.

Crimson tears appeared at the corner of her right eye. A blood vessel was failing under the strain of behemothic effort. It ran down her cheek, and she did not blink.

The secondary limbs were being forced down. Their mass was driven into the main limb, their reach shrinking with every second the field stayed active.

The ones that had been holding soldiers were releasing, the force overriding their grip, the fingers opening despite themselves as the gravity field overloaded whatever muscle they used to hold.

One limb still had movement. The lowest one, pressed flat against the floor, was moving along the stone where the vertical field had the least leverage.

Its fingers closed around her ankle.

She did not look at it.

The pressure built visibly. Her arms were trembling now, the shake running from her hands up through her shoulders. She was beyond everything she had recorded, beyond the mine drainage, beyond the warehouse event, beyond the stalemate below. There was nothing in her memory that applied to this.

Then she reversed the direction.

The gravity field inverted. It was still maximum strength, but now it pushed instead of pressed, a concentrated force driven straight down through the main limb’s mass and back toward the fracture it had come through. The fracture was below. The stone around it had already been damaged by the entry. She pushed the limb back through it.

The main limb resisted. Whatever power drove it pushed back against the force. The secondary appendages thrashed upward against the reversal.

The fracture tore wider as the limb’s mass reversed through it, stone breaking from the edges as the bulk was forced back through the passage it had made.

Then it went through.

The secondary appendages went with it, compressed against the main mass, dragged back below along with it. The fracture started to collapse inwardly, either due the gravity itself or another phenomenon.

She stopped.

Her legs gave out at once, her weight collapsing, and Beorn caught her before she hit the floor. He shifted his grip and held her against him.

She came against him completely, every muscle empty, with nothing left in reserve. He held her against his chest and lowered both of them to the floor. She was breathing. Each breath was a separate effort, slow and rough, her lungs taking whatever they could.

Her eyes were open. The blood from the broken vessel had reached her jaw.

"It’s over," she said.

He stayed where he was. Dust from the damaged fracture edges drifted through the library.

The militia was pressed against the left wall around them, standing or sitting, without words, some tending the wounded, Sig’s leg being wrapped in cloth.

He did not answer, because there was nothing to say that would make it less true.