There is only one egg stalker, thank the gods, a clacking and clicking monstrosity of segmented appendages and body parts. It is crouched over the body of Jeamo, its ovipositor already depositing eggs into his abdomen. The good news is that its stinger is on the ovipositor. The bad news is that Jeamo may not be alive for me to question before I sever his head. Assuming Lynae and I don't end up lying next to Jeamo in paralytic agony while baby bugs hatch in our stomachs and eat us from the inside out.

I leap forward, swinging at the two grasping claws reaching toward me on thin segmented limbs. Above my head, the insect's eyes stare down at me like moons dipped in raw egg whites, its mandibular jaws snapping. I've never seen a bug this big. My blades slide uselessly off its hard exoskeleton. Lynae has moved up next to me, but the tip of her rapier is also having trouble penetrating the insect's armor. A claw reaches for my neck and I swing wildly with the sickle, striking a joint and severing the claw.

"The joints!" I shout. "It's weakest at the joints. Strike there!"

The ovipositor pulls out of Jeamo's abdomen with a sucking sound and swings forward, above the bug's body. I pull back slightly, bouncing on the tips of my feet, waiting for the strike. I may have only one shot at this. The stinger lashes forward toward Lynae. I adjust my stance and swing. As the blade of my sickle cuts into the softer flesh of the stinger tail, I see Lynae's blade parry and divert the stinger. Right at me. I slice off the last cubit of the ovipositor as the stinger pierces my cuirass. My chest burns as though someone pierced it with a red-hot metal rod from the forge, but I can't scream. I try to lift my weapons up to knock the poison-tipped needle out of my chest, but instead my arms drop to my sides.

"Pull it out!" I try to say, but all I hear is a faint whoosh of exhaled air. And then I am falling.

As I start to topple over, I see Lynae lunge forward, thrusting her blade into the joint crack where the head joins the thorax. I hit the dirt of the crevice floor. The fight rages on above me as I hear Lynae swearing and the bug emitting some high-pitched thrum of rage or pain. But all I see is the dirt floor, the crazy jerking of elven and insect feet and lower legs, and beyond them, still as a human cocoon, Jeamo lying on his back, his belly so full of insect eggs that he looks like a pregnant woman coming to term. His head has lolled over to the side, tongue lying limply and wetly against his lips. I catch his eyes. Pleading orbs of pain and fear.

I want to mock his pain, revel in his fear, laugh out loud at the irony of him experiencing the sick hopelessness he inflicted on Norien and goddess knows how many others. I want to. But I can't. His terror infects me like a leathery squirming bug egg shoved deep into my abdomen. Like him, I am helpless. My life is an elf-maid dancing in the dark on the edge of a cliff. One misstep by Lynae and I am dead. If she is killed or wounded or forced to flee or withdraw, I am dead. If one more bug appears out of the blackness at the back of the cavern, even a small one, I am dead.

I can't do anything to save myself. It is the worst feeling I have ever experienced. The fear burns to rage, but the rage has no outlet and explodes into emptiness. Then the fear returns.

The thrashing intensifies and I see Lynae's boot lift off the ground and disappear. I hear her scream, and then the sound is abruptly cut off. There is another thump as the insect slams into the wall and collapses in a heap of jerking limbs right in front of me. The knife-edged end of one segmented leg slashes through the air and cuts into my cheek, just below my eye, before convulsively tightening. The paralytic venom doesn't stop the ragged, throbbing pain. Some of the blood drips into the corner of my mouth, tasting like bitter wine.

The bug twists its jaw back and forth through the moist dirt of the cavern floor, its mandibles a digit away from my face. Its bulbous eyes are damaged and deflating, leaking phosphorescent ichor. My mind recoils instinctively, but my body can't obey. All I can do is watch as the mandibles move back and forth through the moist dirt, slower and slower, until they come to rest by my forehead.

The dirt beneath my head crumbles into the little trough made by the bug's mandibles and my head slides down slightly into the depression, leaving me staring up into the foul mouth of the dead or dying monstrosity. My head rests against one hard mandible. The other one is a few digits above my forehead. 

A viscous runnel of the leaking eye fluid snakes its way slowly but inexorably down the mandible toward me. The cavern is still now. A drop collects on the edge of the mandible above my face and hangs there, glowing slightly. Then it falls.