The needle erupted from Queen Thistle's own belly.
It had been buried deep inside her abdomen, hidden beneath the soft, now-human skin that had finally lost its monstrous extra limbs and roots. The blade was black, glistening, thicker than a wrist, and it snapped upward with a wet, sucking sound as it tore free from her gut. Fresh blood — hot, bright, and red — exploded from the wound in her stomach like a fountain, spraying in thick arcs that splattered across her bare, scarred breasts, dripping over the permanent dark stain marks where black fluids had soaked into her flesh for seven hundred years. The hole in her belly gaped open for a single heartbeat, revealing the torn, glistening interior of her intestines before the edges began to slowly knit themselves closed with wet, organic sounds, leaving only a faint, glistening scar that would never fully fade.
