What? Buck felt his lungs stop working for longer than they should have, his mind taking all the energy available in his body in a weak attempt to understand. It wasn’t making sense in his head. Nothing was. His flesh had been giving out more and more, his skin didn’t respond when he touched anything. His sight had been getting darker with each day. But in that very moment, it all felt clearer than ever.
“What use would I have as a slave?” Buck pleaded, not able to accept his reality. He had spent so long trying to think of things to say as he had traversed the forest but never had he thought it would amalgamate into the scenario he was witness to. “I am weak. Any of those monsters outside could crush me with no effort.”
That laugh. That damned laugh. It made his bones vibrate, made his head, and it was more infuriating than anything else Buck had experienced up until that moment. It was serious. He was going to die. And she was laughing? He supposed he couldn’t expect anything else from a literal monster.
“It would do good to think more highly of yourself in the future,” the fearmonger stated, her flesh-like tendrils moving around in the air as if they were pulsating. Some grew longer, thinner in preparation for something. Buck didn’t know what but he knew he didn’t like it at all. “A proper slave of mine needs compassion as much as he needs obedience.”
The idea of being a slave was sickening. Buck had done something like it earlier in his life, working day in and out for a wage that would leave most were their fists clenched. But that had been to a human. A fat one, yes, but regardless of that still a person with moralities. A monster had none of those. It looked at raw flesh and thought it was food, looked at death and could laugh. It was without emotion, without remorse. The Druid wished for nothing but the power to kill it.
“I did not say yes,” he spits out, though the liquid that came with his words were a bit redder than he would have preferred. The grumbling in his stomach was perhaps due to hunger but it also had warnings of his inner organs shutting down. His lungs were feeling more heavy with each second as if something was pressing down upon them. It wasn’t like what the Warden did, no pressure being at his throat. No… everything was just becoming more muted, the response taking more time. Soon it likely wouldn’t respond at all. “I never said yes to anything.”
“You most certainly did,” the ant responded. Her tendrils were getting thinner, to a point that the ends looked more like wavy strings. There were many of them now too. The full count had to be in the hundreds at that point. “You want to survive and said I could ask for everything if you remember right. You were funnelling so much Mana into those words, you know.”
Buck’s eyes widened at the last comment. No, he couldn’t have, right? There was no chance he had let himself get emotional enough to put power into his tongue. His memory refused to serve him well, not giving enough detail for him to know or not. He could try and disobey to see if it would work but he knew the consequences would be extreme if he did. It would be a death more painful than the one he was being forced to endure.
“Wait,” Buck gasped, pins and needles filling the inside of his body. Everything was slowing down. “If I agreed to it, then you must heal me. Cure me. You need to hold up your end of the agreement”
“Indeed, my little friend,” the ant said agreeing. There was no malice in those words which made the man freeze up even more. “But, for that, I need your obedience. Your body is feisty and it must give up before I can save you. You must give yourself over to me completely.”
The words made no sense, the man unable to accept them. He had already accepted the role of slave, yet she still asked for more? Was the monster without pride, without the concept of holding up their agreements? What was expected of him if nothing should be done from its own side? It made no sense. Why wasn’t she healing him?
“You said you could do it!” Buck tried to shout but it was barely more than a whisper now. The energy was leaving him. He had never felt so cold. “Why aren’t you helping me?”
“Because you need to give yourself over to me first, else your body will reject my intervention and make your blood vessels explode,” the ant responded. The creature stood above his fallen flesh, it's head close to his. The eyes had a red light inside them that made Buck fear the gods more than ever before. “Promise me your life and I will be able to help.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Fine!” the desperate man stated. “You can have it all! Take my life, take my body, take my fucking will, but just help me live! Everything that is mine is yours now.”
The pulse of energy that spread out into the room at that moment made the man think he should have just died at that moment. Perhaps it would have been the smarter choice overall. The lapse in possible judgement was ignored, however, in favour of the tendrils around his body. They had gone beyond the size of a string, becoming so utterly small that Buck had trouble seeing them from afar. Only the ones closest to the eyes were visible consistently.
But wait. Why were the small appendages so close to him? Buck hardly had time to open his mouth in question before it all began to hurt. The ones he could see went for his irises, digging inside like they had nothing better to do. Being delicate was ignored in favour of being quick. The man felt his insides pressed against the outwalls as the tendrils invaded him from everywhere on his body. They went through his skin, his organs, and went right into the open air again just so they could dig inside from another point. It repeated endlessly, the ant before him never allowing it to stop. It was the most horrifying ordeal he had gone through in a long time.
He tried to scream but couldn’t feel his throat. He tried to close his eyes but the eyelids refused to obey. Even the act of moving his toes was found to be impossible. Everything was bound into its current location, not a single part of him allowed to move of his free will.
“This is going to hurt a slight bit,” was all he heard from the ant before he began to see something in the corner of his vision. At first, he thought it a miracle that he had been looking down upon his own body when he was immobilized. A few seconds of having to look upon the sight, however, made him wish he could close his eyes like nothing ever had before.
Muscles, blood vessels, even a few thicker parts of something he couldn’t recognize was ripped from inside his body and taken out. It was like pulling on a long string, more coming with each pull. There was more than the man could have ever imagined inside, and the sight made him want to vomit. Not that he could, his stomach refusing to be felt at that moment.
Then the pain arrived. When pulling on a thread for long enough, one would always meet the end. But what happened when that end was connected to something else, refusing to let go of its home? Well… at such times, one would just pull harder.
Tears were still possible. Buck knew that for a fact, the pain of tearing nerves straight out from his body was more than enough to make them come forth. He wished for death, wished for it all to be over. He tried to curse the ant, trying to make it stop. Not even magic obeyed him anymore, and nor did it send a response to his attempt to use it. It was as if his connection had all but utterly disappeared.
That idea kept him sane, the pain of losing so deeply connected with his profession was a massive source of distraction. Every part of his life had been influenced by his ability to sense the Mana around him but now it all felt like a massive void. Nothing could be seen, felt, or touched. It was as if he was merely an observer in his own body, forced to be locked in without any chance of ever getting out.
Then the pain reminded him that he was awake, that the piece of gore he was seeing was him and not somebody else. Then he tried to scream again. The act of trying felt better, even if it never worked. His body refused to move, nothing allowed anything. Tears were the only real response he made, and they never truly stopped flowing.
How many hours passed? Buck couldn’t tell. Time was a blur, seconds feeling like hours and hours feeling years. Everything got pulled out at some point, though he never truly did stop looking. His eyes changed placement a few times, falling to one side as the skin on his face was pulled on. The ant fixed that so she must have meant for him to see it. Buck didn’t truly know. He wasn’t able to ask.
“Do you support any specific god?” the ant questioned after a very long time. The question surprised the Druid, though he had no way to truly answer. It was to think anyway, the constant needles going in and out of his skin being more than a little distracting. “I know you can’t answer me directly, but try to think hard about one of them if you want to. It would be best if I knew which way to direct the flow.”
The monster even knew there were gods? That was… Buck didn’t know what to think. His mind was too addled to be smart anymore. He could obey at that point, trying harder than normal to figure out where to go towards.
His immediate thought was the Goddess of the Wind yet felt that his current state didn’t warrant praying to one that was the very meaning of freedom. Even if she had owned his thoughts since his youth, there was only one path to take. The [God of Nature] was decided upon. Buck had never seen a statue of his face and was forced to imagine the name itself instead. He only hoped that it was understood.
“To pray to the creator of Monsters is quite bold, but I will respect your choice in this matter,” the ant said. Then… something started anew. “Your body has been purified of the sickness, by the way. There are no remains to be seen.”
That made the tears flow again, though for another reason entirely. The thought of not needing to feel his mortality was greater than anything else. Buck was almost happy about the choice he’d made.
“Now I will have to put you back together,” the ant continued. “Do not worry. I will try to make the outside look as human as possible. That is the point of this anyway.”
… Fear. Buck was reminded of how much he had emotion inside him. Thinking back upon his choice in prayers, he remembered that the [God of Nature] didn’t hold one title. The commonwealth knew him by another name.
The [God of Monsters].