Even now it was impossible to feel certain the monster was really dead. No, that wasn't quite true. Not 'even here', the truth was that the closer she got the more impossible the thought became. The World Eater was... is too big to be killed, least of all by something as pathetic as a starship (could she still remember when seeing one of those felt impossibly vast and grand, too much thing for her little servitor brain to comprehend all at once? No. Not here, maybe never again). 

Bella had been expecting teeth. Massive saws in multilayered rows, each the size of the grand castle on Tellus. Or maybe a great spiraling fan of them drawing ever inward toward a rotting gullet, with a huge tongue like a leaf to scoop up whole continents and grind them to dust on those sharp, quivering protrusions. She's had time to imagine all the ways this place would be shaped to kill her. It hadn't occurred to her she might simply glide past the open beak and find no fresh instruments of death beyond it.

Call it a lack of imagination. She hadn't fully appreciated the scale such a monster must think at, if indeed it ever thought at all. Inside, everything is vast and impersonal, calcified walls of something passing for flesh that stretch far beyond the boundaries of her sight and do not care in the slightest if they kill her here or not.

The fur on her arms and tail bristles with dread. It is not a comforting thought in the least. There must have been, in the old days, entire kingdoms that got swallowed up in a single nightmarish morning and dragged screaming into this thing's stomach so they could wait to be digested. Maybe it took years? Years of feebly trying to hold their laws together, of offering more and more desperate prayers and sacrifices to the merciless Poseidon, begging to be spared, begging to be forgiven, begging to be spat up before it was too late. And then, when it was? Begging to die.

Suddenly all of those songs and stories about Poseidon make a lot more sense. The miserable, spiteful bastard couldn't be satisfied through worship or piety or any other stupid thing. He wanted everyone to realize how utterly small and beneath him they truly were. When the Empire and all of its trash heap outposts all wake up feeling like remorae desperately clinging to the side of a shark the size of creation, when they all understood their utter insignificance, that's when he would smile and start to love them like his children. She shudders. Make no mistake about it, the Empress intended this mission as--

Her reverie is interrupted by a deafening rumble. Bella's eyes shrink to slits and her skin turns paler than the dead. Impossible, utterly impossible, to think this beast could ever die. The shuttle itself is quivering. It takes her a moment to realize that's because her arms are so taut they're twitching of their own accord. She chances a long, slow banking maneuver. It would leave her exposed to Imperial pursuit. But she has to know.

And she sees it. Where the tongue should be, though it must have hardened itself into a mountain range by now, stray clumps of old dirt that maybe once were cities are coming loose from their years long balancing act and colliding with one another. Good job, Princess. See what you've done? The earth churns against itself like gladiators wrestling over a thrown sword. Grass gives way to soil, and out of that like corpses spills chunks of stone and steel large enough to crush her shuttle into nothing, and then beneath that the flashes of crystalline blue that must mean the World Eater had gone silent bleeding from its gums. Maybe it still was? Who knew how this thing worked. 

Bella lets out a deep, shuddering sigh. She is supremely careful as she lifts first one hand and then the other off of her controls so that she can smooth her hair and fur. She flicks the bells on her arms, then reaches to her neck to trace the contours of her collar. Her next sigh is... not calmer. But more subdued.

"I can't wait to get free of this place. What kind of insane moron would come here willingly?"