She felt the Ouroborean moving underneath her, a mesh of magical filaments in the crude shape of a living thing. She could feel what it felt, and she understood why it shrugged off blows and weapons. The shape was just a shape, a physical incarnation of the spell, but not the spell. It could be whatever it needed to be.

“Watch and learn, Reader.” The buzzing voice resonated through Alice’s skull.

The creature’s severed shoulders rippled, and two new limbs emerged from each, as long and flexible as tentacles. A pair of them reached for Erdrodr; she chopped one of them out of the way, but the other wrapped around her waist. The two fire-sprites rushed forward, skewering the tentacle with their spears, and the ice giant girl wriggled free. Two more tentacles reached for Helga, but her flashing ax blades cut them in half.

In the shadow-world of Writing, Alice tore at the structure of the Ouroborean, ripping the spell to pieces. It shredded in her mental grasp, no more substantial than cobweb, and it took her a moment to realize that she wasn’t making any progress. The Ouroborean was intricate, interlaced with itself a thousand times over, and the pieces she ripped away were drawn back into alignment as though they’d never been torn.

“A fine effort,” the Ouroborean buzzed. “But if the Readers could have destroyed me, don’t you think they would have, long ago?”

Ripples spread from the creature’s shoulders to its back, and more tentacles burst forth. Five, ten, twenty ribbons of darkness curving through the air, trying to get at Alice.

Her friends stood in their way, hacking and slashing and stabbing. Black mist flew around Helga, and Erdrodr severed tentacle after tentacle while Flicker and Actinia watched Alice’s back. Michael’s silver darts and Isaac’s slashing blades of ice harried the twisting limbs, and Jen leaped onto the creature’s back to slash the tentacles off at their roots with her claws. Dex stood directly in front of Alice, her swords intercepting anything that got too close.

“Your friends are persistent,” the creature said. Alice felt its structure twist and shift. “But you have led them to their deaths.”

Alice wanted to shout a warning, but that would mean returning her attention to the real world, and she didn’t dare. She ripped at the structure of the spell, searching desperately for a way to hurt the Ouroborean faster than it rebuilt itself, bits of wrecked magic floating all around her.

More tentacles sprouted, and their tips were as sharp and hard as spears.