It was just a dream. I kept telling myself over and over. Just a dream. None of what was happening to me was real. I gnashed the spiked mandibles at the bottom of my face and thrashed around inside of a cramped dungeon cell. The long segments of my spine coiling around and around and grasping at the length of my vile body.
My black lidless eyes burned to blink and my antenna both probed around beyond my control. Something cold and wet dripped down on me from the gaps in the ceiling of my prison. A great jiggling mass hung over me and then dropped itself down in long stringy strands of blue slime.
It fell with a plop and coated a third of my body. On instinct the legs on each segment of my long form helped roll me around to ensnare the large slime that had come to dine on me. It seared into my chitinous plates and I plunged my mandibles into the gel of its body.
My nightmare body had a torso like a human woman’s with a horribly hungering centipede’s head sat atop my plated neck. Below my waist my body ran off into a train of over a dozen segments, each covered by smooth maroon coloured chitin plates. Each segment came complete with their own sets of yellow legs. And each of the long fingers sprouting off from my human-ish arms’ plate covered hands ended in bright red points which were dripping with my cursed toxin.
Some of the slime had started working itself inside a gap the creature had burned through my armour. The flesh inside of that segment wriggled furiously, the legs spasming around inside of the slime’s slippery body.
It burned in my mouth as I drank it down and scorched my throat as it sizzled along inside of my stomach. I was starting to taste the venom from my fingers and knew that I’d already won. My toxin was corrupting the very mana that constituted the creature’s entire being.
After a few seconds longer its body quivered violently before bursting over top of me and then running off to every corner of my cell.
I rolled my long body over and feverishly plunged my face into one of the shimmering blue pools beneath me. Lapping up as much of the slime as I could before its leaky remains were swallowed up by the ground.
Once it was all gone I reared myself up and shrieked a horrible noise in frustration. A bottomless pit of hunger burned inside of me and I looked down at my burnt limbs. Reaching down to grasp one, which the slime had nearly eaten away from my body, I twisted it hard and yanked the leg free. My steamed flesh tasted exquisite. The countless sharp teeth filling my maw crunched up my chitin into dry little flakes that cut my mouth and throat as I swallowed them down.
After six more of my leg were eaten my body calmed and I started to settle. I could already feel my mana slowly regrowing the first small nubs of fresh limbs as new armour formed across the holes that the slime had burned into me.
I grabbed the bars of my cell and pulled. White hot mana shuddered through the slim metal rods and straight into me. White sparks shot out of my hands and they began to crackle and hiss with steam before bursting into intense flames. I pulled on those bars and filled the air with a horrendous noise and thick smoke until nothing was left but the blackened stumps of my wrists.
My long body coiled up and I collapsed against myself to bide my time and rest.
It was thanks to these awful nightmares that I’d inherited from one of my mothers, her warped and wicked memories, that I had a mind that could withstand just about any kind of torture that I’d ever been faced with. That hideous and writhing body of hers I was currently inhabiting had come from a broken pact and the terrible curse I knew she had once placed upon this land.
That was the thing that nobody else really knew when it came to the curse that had once eaten up all that lived within our realm. Of course when she came out from hiding the merciful merchant witch was able to undo the foul spell. She was the one that had placed it to begin with.
And for better or worse, I was one of her offspring. A vine elf. Born from the union between Marinclay’s extremely potent mana and the wombs of her harem of dryads. Something that might not have been so bad if we weren’t all marked and cursed before we’d even been born.
Every time that a vine elf died a dark slime would envelop what remained of our bodies to absorb our souls and then in time Marinclay would implant us again into the dryad that first birthed us. Leaving us with them to grow fresh new bodies from our mother dryad’s essence until we were ready to fall from the vine once more.
And every time I’d died and been reborn I’d been left to start again, naked and alone in my nursery grove. Left to fend for myself in the frail body of a child.
So many deaths and so many lives, constantly clawing for anything within my reach only to have it all dashed away and be set back to zero with nothing left but heartache. Over and over again as I kept accumulating memories. And then to still be cursed with these nightmares at every sleep.
I mostly felt warmly for my mother dryad as each time I came back to her she’d cradle her belly and whisper to me about how much she adored me and my will to keep fighting.
Marinclay on the other hand. What else was there to say other than that I hated her? She was some great imposing misery that always hid away much too far for me to reach. And to me it seemed like she mostly just liked toying with her children’s endless lives. Even the few other vine elves I’d met through all of my lifetimes mostly felt the same way about her.
Unfortunately for us, the name Marinclay meant so much to the humans in this land that we could never escape it. It was also because of our shared parent that each of us was in constant danger if we revealed ourselves by accident or by acting without thinking.
To some people they saw as us the sacred immortal children of a Lesser Goddess and so they would seek us out to offer worship and tribute. To others we were nothing more than objects of superstition to be bought and bartered with and used as our captors pleased.
I’d had more than one lifetime end shortly after being found out. Sometimes by my own hand to spare myself some form of perverse suffering and on occasion I’d be struck down by the ones who found me out just as soon as they saw through to the true me. There were many kinds of people more than happy to harvest our bodies after the dark slimes were done feasting on our souls. Swearing by the magical properties we held as ingredients.
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In one of my worst lives things ended with me being butchered while kept alive with magic to see if it would change the flavour of my meat by a merchant who’d managed to capture me twice across his miserable life. It took him and his family so many moons that I lost count before they finally carved off enough of my flesh for my heart to stop beating. And before the end I’d suffered through learning the taste of my body’s own flesh. Cooked as well as raw so that my butchers could grill me on which way an elf preferred to eat their own kind.
Other times when I’d died while being eaten weren’t quite as awful as that. At least beasts and monsters lacked the sense to ration out their meals. Some even did me the kindness of snapping my neck before getting started while others made me bleed out as they dined on my entrails.
My dream body had started stirring. I saw that the bones of my hands were mostly regrown. Thin strips of muscle crawling out from my burned wrists to wrap around my fresh digits.
My many limbs scurried my body over to a wall separating me from the neighbouring cell. The large stone bricks used to make it were the same sort that engineers used when building city walls. Thick and solid and built to withstand an army’s invasion. I turned my head back to look at the opposite wall and clicked my mandibles with frustration. There was a large hole there.
Through untold sums of moons mother had laboured away to slowly pull three of the heavy bricks out from it.
Leading back through the thick walls of each cell after cell after cell and all the way on back to the furthest wall. That wall only had one brick missing as once mother had tried to scrape at the exposed dirt she’d found that it was sealed with repelling mana just like all of the bars. An array of desperation dug holes painstakingly scraped out by Marinclay in an agonizing bid to find just a single cell with its door still left standing open.
She’d still been a regular elf the last time a human had come to toss her some scraps or take another prisoner away for execution. Thinking about it filled her with a sickening sorrow. And then her stomach growled with a ferocity that drove her onward. She faced the wall in front of her and shoved all ten points of her fingers and thumbs into the gap she’d spent the last several moons chipping into the mortar, until they came back out bloodied and raw. Her bones glinting out between split chitin and shredded tissue to greet our shared eyes.
I didn’t know what Marinclay had done to be placed in that dungeon and forgotten but I’d dreamed many times about the moment she had traded her elf body away for that of the unfortunate nightmare beast she had become.
I thought back on another dream inside of my current one while my dream self went back to clawing her bony fingers against the nigh impenetrable prison.
She was rail thin and sat huddled on the shredded remnants of the black dress she’d must have been wearing when they arrested her. Her bones poked through her papery pale skin and most of the hair had fallen from her head. What little remained hung in frazzled strands of long and greasy white hairs. Her long ears sagged into a defeated droop. She was muttering something incomprehensible to herself and occasionally let out a raw cackle while rocking back and forth.
The guards hadn’t been by to feed her or the other prisoners in some time and she’d heard the death rattles of several other inmates as their bodies succumbed. First from thirst and then eventually others from hunger after their cellmates ran out of meat and bodily water. Mother had only just managed to hang on by eating what little moss and cave fungus she could cultivate with her mana inside of the darkness of her cell.
In that way things were fine for a time. But then the rats and the slimes and the insects came. Long since out of corpses to feed on they came to her meager dungeon grove. And then they ate. She did her best to try and stop them only to have an army of carrion feeders descend upon her. Biting and tearing into her withered flesh. Desperate to burrow their way to her soft insides and have their fill of free elf meat.
Elves like my mother, the first elves of the forest, had sworn an ancient pact that forbid them to ever consume any type of creature flesh. For mother, desperate and in the heat of that horrible moment, this eternal pact was forgotten. Having lost all of her senses and reason, Marinclay forsook that ancient treaty and bit off the head of a centipede that was in the process of biting off half of her lower lip.
She chewed and she crunched and she swallowed the insect’s head down her throat. In that moment her mana became corrupted and her spine started to snap and to stretch. Her skin tearing along seams made by so many biting creatures. Gleeful with madness she then joined in on the feeding frenzy. Eating insects, rats, small dungeon slimes and even her own flesh on occasion.
Without noticing it I’d fallen fully back into that moment in my recalled dream and immediately regretted thinking about it.
At some point during her feast her mind had cleared back to some semblance of reason and her stomach felt heavy and putrid with rot. The bodily purges and spasms that came with our transformation was an agony that made broken ribs like a light kick to the shin by comparison. The mana in her body turned a sickly colour and accumulated faster than she knew what to do with it. Instead of growing more plants to sustain herself she filled this new mana full of her most hateful feelings and let it seep out from her core without care. A command that each and every plant of the realm heard as it echoed out from under the capitol. The command to consume all. To bring low the land that the old Fool Lord had once held so dear.
The mad witch Marinclay had been born.
And then, and all at once, my nightmare was fading into darkness as I felt my mind fall away from some of my mother’s worst memories.
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I blinked my eyes and slowly raised my head up into darkness with a groan, bringing myself a fresh wave of pain while trying to stretch. My body was more than eager to remind me that I’d recently ruined it and it did so without any semblance of remorse.
I sat up in my bedroll, flinging the top part off of me and shook my head a few times to get rid of the tail end of my sleep haze. When I shivered and noticed I wasn’t wearing most of my clothes my mind drifted away from my unpleasant dreams and onto what had happened before I went to sleep. It was probably only just past early night and that meant that a dark breakfast would be waiting.
And if I was lucky so was Persephone.
I told myself that it wasn’t really that I wanted to talk to her again, first thing after waking, only that I wanted to make sure that their bedrolls had been alright. An argument that, to me, didn’t even sound halfway toward being convincing as I tossed it around inside of my head. Though I did know I should feel at least a little concerned that she had gone and found out about my ears.
I started to pull my torn overalls on and felt around for my cap. Knowing Boss he’d have us rolling out before high moon which meant we had a long night of travel ahead of us. To reach Barken would be around three or four moons and that old miser would likely growl at us for not making it in two. Blowing some hair from my face on a long sigh, I stuck my cap on over my ears and made my way out into the crisp chill of another new night.