Sil was lifted into the air by the neck, rough and sudden. With her entire weight hanging suspended, she reached her hands up and gripped the bony appendage. It did not help much.
“But first, we’ve much to do. It will hurt, I’m afraid. It must.”
She was swung around and gazed into madness. Blinked. Closed her eyes but the roughness of the treatment had her open them.
How could she even take in the whole of the creature revealed by the spritelight? What to focus on first?
It wasn’t a spider, but wore the shape of one.
It wasn’t human.
It wore the skin of a young Erisa draped and stretched across meat and bones that resembled nothing short of a fever nightmare. It had too many eyes, too many hands, too many legs on which to carry its monstrous corpus.
A distended belly on the underside of the thing rippled with movement.
A hollow-eyed face crowned a tall, sinewy neck, and blinked too many eyes. A mouth like a fist of claws and fangs gaped at her, forming words that gurgled.
“Still a clutch to birth. These would have been my best, my hope… until you came along.”
Sil wanted to scream.
She wanted to ask things that she wasn’t sure were wise to know.
But she found no air in her lungs, not even to scream. Her mouth opened and closed but no words slipped out, all of them barred behind the barrier of her fright. The beat of her heart shook her like a puppet on strings as the monster carrier her away. It gripped a wall and climbed up one of the many shafts.
Soon, she understood and wished she hadn’t. This Erisa wasn’t a single creature. Tendrils of flesh guided their path back, like a fisherman’s line pulling them back. Wherever they were headed would be the real lair, and the whole of Erisa would be revealed.
Erisa moved with amazing grace and speed as it ascended through galleries, past cavernous rooms filled with bodies mounted into piles. She’d made many children. Sil couldn’t even count the piles of corpses. Their decaying stench was a nearly physical presence.
Water flowed everywhere. It dripped from the levels above, swirled in torrents down corridors, and seemed to always carry with it bits and pieces decomposed corpses. After so long with only dust, the miasma of death was an unwelcome change.
“What do you want with me?” she squeaked out. Her shoulder and neck muscles burned as continued her route.
“To make me human again,” Erisa answered. “You will bear me and I will be human again. After that, I can leave here.”
But that made no sense!
What could have stopped the girl for simply walking away? She could puppeteer creatures as she pleased so why all of this? Why did she linger in a place of so much pain?
Questions. Questions. Swirling questions with no immediate answers and no courage left over to seek them. Unarmed and alone, how could she resist this thing? As much as she tried to summon a barrier and wield it the same way Erisa had, all she managed was give herself a blinding headache at the attempt.
She knew of no prayer to the goddess that could help her now.
Or… maybe she didn’t need a prayer? The Goddess had listened before. Maybe she still did.
“This one… requires… aid.”
She pushed the words through gritted teeth. Nothing happened except for her heart threatening to explode as the sight of their destination came into view. Closing her eyes did nothing to lessen the fear.
Pressure in her chest suggested a fatal conclusion to her terror.
It increased, like liquid fire in her veins to burst in a lance of white-hot energy from her fingers .With barely a heartbeat to aim, her hand swung in an arc at the monster holding her.
Erisa howled in pain and dropped Sil onto a pile of naked corpses. The white hand dropped with a splash in the water behind.
Whatever Panacea had done to aid left Sil’s veins screaming in agony as the memory of power dissipated. Even if she dared another request like that, she was certain she wouldn’t survive the discharge.
Sputtering, spitting and heaving, she rolled off the mound and splashed away, wet webs clinging and tripping her up. Her sprite doggedly followed as she lit the way inside, looking for any small alcove to stuff herself into so Erisa couldn’t follow.
It was a ridiculous attempt. Not barely ten paces away and she slammed head-first into an invisible barrier. Stars exploded in her vision as she fell. Another barrier appeared at her back, and the sides, a neat box to arrest her fall.
Erisa sauntered forward, already growing a fresh arm on the stump.
“Terribly unkind of you, sister,” it said in a voice nearly human, laden with echoes. “I would be angry if I did not understand your fear.”
“I don’t know what you imagine you’ll do, Erisa, but it can’t work as you believe it to. What’s happened to you cannot be reversed.”
To be made into a monster and then crave humanity again? Sil couldn’t begin understanding in what murky waters Erisa’s mind swam, but she had the edges of the girl’s plan.
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Broken apart and set into alien bodies, soul melded to spirits that were wholly inhuman, only to emerge again as a whole consciousness? Insane concept, but possible in its absurdity. And this horrid form, the mountain of human flesh and spider chitin? This was the end shape of which Erisa couldn’t free herself.
Tallah couldn’t get this soul. It wasn’t a soul at all, but a gestalt of everything that had attached itself to the girl as she’d been devoured and regurgitated by the soul crucible that Mother must have been.
“You want to…” The right words wouldn’t come out. She understood what Erisa wanted and recoiled against the idea. “You want to… to do to me… what’s been done to you. It won’t work. It can’t work.”
“It must work!” Desperation tinged these words. Or a kind of hope that only long imprisonment could have bred. “If it doesn’t work, I don’t know what I might do. We will be as sisters, true-blooded sisters. And all will be well.”
Like bugger she’d accept that. In spite of the barriers, Sil had no intention of allowing herself be trapped in this place, much less so bearing what the girl had in mind.
“My friends will come for me.” It sounded desperate even to her own ears. But the barriers began moving, carrying her along as if she were a fly caught in a web. “Tallah is more than ready to burn this place to the stone to get what she means to.”
Erisa rotated her in the air so she ended up facing the creature.
It took up the entire room. What she’d seen wasn’t even a significant part of it.
Details ran together, glistening flesh flowing like water. There was the corpse of the Mother in the dead centre of the room, a spider of such size that it would rival and probably eat a drake. It made the seed for the rest that had erupted out of it.
Like the aftermath of a bloody battle in close quarters, Erisa was all blood and exposed viscera, an amalgamation of bodies that rose to the high ceiling above and beyond it. Mutation on a scale Sil had never witnessed before, of a kind that simply could not be real.
And yet, the creature lived. Hearts pumped blood among its web-like structure of displaced organs and overgrown limbs. The part that was visible had fashioned a body in the shape of a human and dressed it in human-like skin. Aping humanity with no memory of what that meant.
Parts moved. They writhed. Rearranged. Bled. Discharged puss and worse. The stench of it was an abattoir in mid-summer heat.
For the uncountable time Sil voided acid, the only thing still sloshing in her guts.
There were more girls here, looking like distorted copies of Erisa, lolling about as if devoid of minds. Like the mutant found at the end of the forest, these were all in some stage of oddness that defied her medical experience.
In the great mass of flesh, spread like gruesome pockets, swollen protrusions rippled with motion from within, the overstretched skin moving like hot wax.
One by one, they ruptured. Where Erisa’s remains had birthed spiders, here two nearly human bodies spilled out and tumbled to the floor. Several of the girls aided them to their feet, their movements oddly staggered.
Too many eyes. Too many fingers. Too few toes. Sil, the medic, catalogued almost absently how these differed from the template Erisa had kept failing to copy.
Sil, the woman at the end of her wits, wanted to close her eyes but couldn’t allow this abhorrent things out of her sight. She was too afraid to even blink lest Erisa enact her plan.
Another belly ruptured and spilled out a white-fleshed Leuki to twitch alone on the floor. The girls did not help this one.
“You do not see me as I wish to be seen, sister,” all of the Erisa copies said as they worked. “You see the monster but you do not understand. You will.”
Sil put up her own barriers to hold those that moved her. It worked for a few heartbeats, until the Leuki rolled over and crept towards her. A touch of its claws shattered the weave and sent daggers of agony through her as the force of her construct recoiled. It walked by her side as she was dragged.
“Why do you fear the pain, sister Dreea? It will pass. All pain passes.”
Barriers dropped and she swayed in the moment of freedom. Then small hands gripped her wrists and ushered her along. Fighting any of the girls was folly. Their touch was ice cold in the stifling, wet heat of the nest. Their strength, for such frail-looking things, beggared belief. She could dig her heels in and it would’ve made no difference.
Erisa occupied what had once been some kind of medical site, if Sil were to go by the visible detritus. The ruins of alembics and other, more exotic glass apparatus, faded drawings of strange anatomy peeking out from under the webs, a table meant for surgery at the bottom of what seemed an amphitheatre for observation. All human in design, known to her from the School.
Among it all, was the corpus that wore human skin and wished to be human, moving on its tendril of flesh like a pale ghost. Barriers dropped and children grabbed Sil’s arms to drag her forward. Erisa followed. Sacs across its body inflated and flattened in a slow, deliberate rhythm. Sil fought and struggled, dug in her heels and kicked out at the girls.
They accepted her abuse and did not even slow. They forced her to the operating table, their size belying incredible strength.
On a moment’s inspiration, Sil wiggled a hand free of a girl’s grasp and tried to punch the one tying straps around her ankles. Her fingers snapped with a wet crunch against an invisible wall. Pain lanced up the arm and a girl with multi-jointed limbs wrenched her backward. It tied the hurt arm to the table.
She could beg for Erisa to stop. It likely wouldn’t work.
She could make promises. Lie. Say anything just to be freed… but something told that Erisa would not listen. Her arm throbbed in blinding pain, and the remains of Panacea’s fire still smouldered in her veins, turning all of her alight with heightened sensations.
She could pray again. Incinerate part of the girl and herself with it. Would Panacea accept such prayer?
Erisa lowered herself to the floor and skittered on impossible legs until above the table. Sil could do nothing but watch as the thing leered closer, shown in all its terrible gory glory by spritelight. Fear kept the sprite alight. Hard as she wanted to dismiss it, she couldn’t bear the dark alone with the monsters.
This part had taken the general shape of a spider with an abdomen trailing entrails, now voided of its children. Even as she watched, skin pulled back and something emerged from beneath flaps of flesh.
“No…” Breath hitched in her throat and even the sprite shivered and dimmed at the sight of the ovipositor.
One of the girls ran a hand across her stomach, fingertips barely caressing the ruined fabric of Sil’s clothes. The material split apart as if it had been cut by the finest surgeon’s scalpel. She’d felt the claws pricking skin, drawing a line of pain. Hot blood welled out.
The caress of warm air on her exposed stomach sent violent shivers through her. The girl moved and cut the waist of her trousers. Pulled them lower.
“No!”
Erisa loomed above, all of her in sight. To Sil’s growing horror, the face smiled down at her. “It will only hurt, sister. Nothing more, just pain. You will be cared for until ready to birth me anew.” A shiver of pleasure ran through the overgrown body and the thick stinger lowered until its fleshy tip touched Sil’s skin, hot and wet. “You will make me human again. You must.”
Something moved beneath the revolting skin.
It resembled a string of translucent pearls, flowing down somewhere through Erisa’s tendril to the back of the stinger. They clumped in a white pile behind the needle of chitin.
Girls surrounded the table, watching with rapt focus as Erisa lowered herself as if to embrace Sil. The stinger pressed harder against skin, just beneath her bellybutton. A shake of the great body moved it lower to leave behind a trail of cooling secretions.
Rugged, hard fingers forced her mouth open only to stuff a fist inside and challenge the keening scream building in her throat.
“Human again,” Erisa crooned. “We will be human together.”
She lifted her abdomen higher and one of the children guided the stinger.