Should I Begin By Disclaiming?
Should I begin by disclaiming how deeply miserable I am to be retreading these roads? I’ve always found something innately pathetic about explaining myself. The concillatory gesture, prostrate before the judgment of another.
Victory, after all, is self-evident. If my story was one ending triumphant, why would I stand here preparing my case as if awaiting a capital trial? Yet if my story truly met a dire end, would I even persist to speak it?
So much is prefigured even in the manner in which I speak, the subtext that dwells and wriggles like so many parasitic worms, an infestation of meaning. And this text is not even the primary host. What was I, but a vector?
To whom shall I address this? The knights who drag my body back for a trial before the president and king? My children who’ll bear my curse and praise me like a goddess? The friends I’ve lost and discarded, all those wondering where it went wrong, what could have saved me? The historians eager for a primary source? Myself, always the fairest critic?
I contemplate the tedium of recounting my life from childhood on, and I fear this endeavor will find its end on this very first page. Must I recall every detail, set the scene and tighten the pace to keep you entertainted? Must I hone my rhetoric to some particular end, convince you of my innocence or divinity? I’d prefer the rack.
But I suppose there is one exception. I’ve felt this angst before — a pressing need to say anything coupled with the utter inability to articulate that anything to some impressive standard. And yet, there was someone who listened — patient through the rambling, attentive through the confusion, always poised to ask the right question that proved she was listening.
I could say anything to her, and she always seemed blessed to hear it.
Ever Seen A Chrylurk?
“Ever seen a chrylurk?”
In front of the crouching vesselblade, a transmutation circle splayed out. Blue-white dust there on the ground — dry stuff, yet it seemed to take cues from glue. The alchemy-chalk had as much carved lines in the dirt as inscribed them. That had to weaken the effect, I thought.
Then two fingers snapped, summoned that spark, and lightning-glow seared an afterimage on my eyes.
But I guess that’s just skill.
Argent, the vesselblade, was a Conjure-class Shatter-grained — the rarest emyra type you could get without getting immediately marked for containment. I knew that, and I’d seen his inmut before. Yet, when the glow gave way to mist of frozen air, and linked chains of ice extruded like grasping fingers, I still gasped.
Each sickle-curve had a crystalline brillance, briefly catching the sunlight before releasing sparkling distortion. Shattergrain. He had that in common with Grand-sage Luca. With all the giants that had wrought modern alchemy. The blue-white dust of our chalk was but tiny shards grounded from a crystalline transmutation just like this.
And me? Enchant-class Clay-grained. Only the most common emyra in the whole world. Seven times more of me than there were of him. Maybe I should feel resentful.
Then he glanced up from where he’s crouched, face pale between black locks, and he smiled gently at me and I smile back.
“You there, Emil? Or are you saving all your focus for tomorrow?”
Right, his question wasn’t idle. His transmutation wasn’t idle either, he would say. It was practice, training — even if it was clear from the way he spun the sickle-chain, letting it loop around his fingers, that he also just enjoyed the way his inmut felt.
“I’ve read the manuals,” I said. “Studied the diagrams, the methods. I know what we’re up against.”
He laughed once. “Can count on you to do the reading, I know.”
It’s more than reading, I don’t say. It’s taking notes, it’s practicing the remuts. You don’t learn anything if you just read about it.
It was just a word. Just a sentence, not worth clarifying. Wait, just one sentence? Did he say anything else?
He’s looking at me, an eyebrow quirked. It really looks like I’m not paying attention.
“Sorry, can you repeat that?”
No sigh, no cringe. He said, “It’s different, meeting a bug in the flesh.”
“I’ve met iatrogos,” I said. Then I heard what I sounded like. “Not what you meant, I’m sorry.” I’m not a bigot, I didn’t say, because that wouldn’t have helped.
“Not entirely irrelevant.” He swung his hand sharply upward, and the chain jumped back and forth. Pendulum. “Some react badly to both. Eyes, chitin, segments, freaks them out.”
“I like it,” I said. What did I mean by that? “Not the problem with chrylurks.”
He nodded. “The appearance is one thing. You can be prepared for that and still get caught bad by the speed, or the ambush tactics. It’s hard enough to win against a chrylurk in a fight, but the real danger is that you’re hers before you even have a chance to fight.”
I’d heard the phrase before. The lose condition against a chrylurk wasn’t that you’d fail, or that you’d die.
It was that you would become hers.
“Most chrylurks we catch early in the lifecycle, when there’s just one to deal with. We aren’t that lucky here. It’s a budding hive, but a small one.” Then he paused, as if catch himself. “But you know this. You read the summons.”
I did. “You’re going somewhere with this, I don’t mind.”
“Teams are selected for a reason. You were selected for a reason.”
The emphasis. There had to be a reason, because I’m not good enough to merit inclusion without question. He’d never say it, which is why I had to think it.
“I think I figured out why. Maybe the full brief will say it outright, but I would understand if they didn’t — bad for morale. But it’s your inmut.”
My innate transmutation. I stiffened and looked down. My eyes fell to the sickle-chain, the brilliant crystals. He had performed his innate transmutation with the gravitas of doodling on a page. Right now he was playing with it.
If I played with my innate transmutation, things would simply die.
“I don’t want to use it,” I said. I wasn’t practiced with it. I had the most boring, most statistically unremarkable emyra affinity — so of course the unique thing about me is that my inmut is lethal to the point of uselessness. On paper, it might sound powerful. But how do you train anything like that?
I kicked some dirt, and the spray landed over the transmutation circle. His circle. It was practice, he’d say.
“Our mission is to neutralize the hive. Contain the spread of chrylurks by any means possible. With more than one of them — with a hive, even if it’s a small one — the possibility that we don’t make it back is so much higher.”
“They wouldn’t assign us a mission we couldn’t do,” I asserted. There was something in my tone, I could tell by how his face shifted. I crossed my arms.
Hand went up — just one, since the other was occupied. “They wouldn’t,” he said. “But the strategists have to assess the risks and mitigate them. And if the risk is that we become hers?”
I won’t do it, I didn’t say.
He finished: “I think you’re meant to kill us.”
Gravid Wound
Parasitoid that runs her stinger-ovipositor into your soft, fatty tissues, piercing you again and again up and down your paralyzed body. Making your flesh bulge with her eggs, pockmarked with holes leaking blood and slime. Wet pussies torn open, each with their own fertilized gore-wombs. Each is sealed back up, sutured with silk, glazed with sticky secretions, in bandage-chastity.
It makes you flush and swoon — because you’re feverish, flesh pale and sweating, immune system failing in the face of the new gifts in your veins. But even that resistance serves her — your body cooks itself to warm her eggs perfectly.
You’re weakening, but not from hunger; she chews up meat and spits it into your mouth, maxilae shoving it down your throat if you dont swallow, and her drooling maw is your hydration.
Time passes in a nightmarish haze, but you’re wide awaken when the eggs start wiggling inside you. She seems impatient for it, groping you with chitinous limbs, fingering your swollen gashes. The sharp tip of her ovipositor everts again, and once again wets itself with your blood.
You think it’s torture at first, a thousand slow and hateful stabs to make you suffer, but she’s so careful, so precise. Each scarred, egg-laden hole is carefully surrounded with a trypophilic halo of pits — vents for her children to breathe, you realize.
You don’t sleep that night. How could you? The wiggling continues, at first tiny kicks, and then a sustained rhythm getting more strained and anticipatory. You feel your heart beat in every slit.
You’re waiting, and it doesn’t happen — nothing tells you the transition from one agony to another is complete. Your whole body is crawling with the movement of something alien. Then you realize these can’t all be the twitches of eggs not yet hatched — they have hatched, and your her children are already stirring.
Breaths turn sharp, and then into screams. It hurts. Dozens of worms writhing, widening their wombs, mouth finding the walls and ripping off muscle fibers or slurping into fat deposits — devouring you from within.
And then you see her ovipositor is out again. Its narrow, leaking tip is lining up with one of your sealed gashes. With a thrust, the bandaged is torn through, scar-chastity violated, and slime lubricated chitin is rubbing against your insides. Sawing back and forth until it finds something — the grub who calls this lesion home.
She’s woundfucking you, while silencing your screams with mandibles clamping your tongue and maxillae exploring your mouth.
And then, with a shudder, you feel something cool against your feverish flesh, leaking in from her ovipositor. She pumps slime into your wounds. Maybe she knows your flesh can’t nourish and sustain her young entirely, or maybe it aids in your digestion, or maybe—
You were dreadfully sure you couldn’t endure her fucking every pussy she’d torn open. But now you can feel her slime numbing the pain of her thrusting and her gnawing young to a dull ache.
You gasp when her mandibles release your mouth — only to immediately yelp as she bites down on your neck, and you can feel the buzz of venom delivered. Only this isn’t venom, is it? Not what paralyzed you. This feels…
You heart beats faster, and your muscles release. A breath you didn’t know you were feeling leaves you. You feel at peace — you feel as one. The mother above you with antennae atremble and mouths drooling excitement, her hands unable to resist palming your sweaty, bloody, lively flesh. The grubs inside you are mindless but for their hunger to relish the nutrients you are utterly replete with.
It’s beautiful what you’re apart of, isn’t it? Life in its most lurid cycle.
You’re moaning when she rips open your next womb, pumping you with more trophic slime to feed and digest and numb you. You’re mouthing pleases and thank yous — for the children, for the dripping loads, for the venom-injection that cleared your mind.
You wish you had the strength and movement in your paralyzed limbs to service her, repay even slightly. Stroke that ovipositor and help it align and enter smoothly, grope that fat abdomen and its soft cuticle, to hump the strong legs that pin you down.
As she gets ready to woundfuck you again, you kind of want to feel that ovipositor in your mouth, stinger pricking your throat as she rams it in, her pleasure twitching up and down the length, and taste that slime, nourishing you like just like one of her children. Maybe if you’re good, she will…
Most of all, you can’t wait for the next injection.
Can you imagine enduring the high coming down, your limbs hollowed out flesh outweighted by those annelid grubs?
No.
You just have to be a good little eggsack.
From the Ovipositor’s Tip
That isn’t cum, dripping in thick, sticky lines from the swollen tip of her abdomen. You can tell by the smell: earthy and sharp like a musky flower luring you in close for a deeper whiff (choke on her pheromones), with a salty note that promises it would be so delicious if you just give it a lick.
This is vermincholie, and just one drop could be enough to turn you into her thrall. Infested, fattened, and bleeding for her. Just one drop — but a hole pumped until it’s gaped and overflowing is how she makes sure it takes.
Where it falls on your skin — where she glazes you — it hardens to something membranous and stiff, like wax scales. Your flesh prickles, by turns numbed and radiating this throbbing, pleasant warmth. It takes after chrylurk venom in that way.
It numbs you (a soothing lie) because the accurate reading is excruciating. It takes after venom — as a tranquilizing painkiller, yes, but also as a digestive enzyme-stew. Her vermincholie sinks into you like burning acid.
Chrylurks do not cum; their reproduction has no need for the male sex. Her genes spread in a viral payload; her oozing discharge is infecting your cells.
Even the female sex is optional; her virus alone could make a womb of its host tissue, recapitulating evolution and as if by spontaneous generation, turning vermincholie into vermin proper — now beget the wriggling worms of her larvae.
The secret of chrylurk reproduction is that one drop is all it takes, so when she runs you through with her ovipositor and makes you bulge with eggs, this is largely an excess — an indulgence, even. A chrylurk egg is just vermincholie held secure, the jelly-like yolk serving to nourish vermin that could very well survive without it.
So tomorrow, when she bends you over again to pump you full and numb and hers, she’s simply spoiling the young you’re host to. Like a mother breastfeeding her babe, a chrylurk fucks their thrall.
Infested, Swelling
Note: deleted footnote from The Larval Entiote
Of course, writing “reproductive system” instead of womb immediately prompts one to imagine the alternative. I’m skeptical it would be effective, but there’s something to imagining maggots infesting a member. They divert the bloodflow to feed on it, which has side effect of leaving it swollen permanently hard. Impossible for the host to ejaculate due to the worms plugging the hole, so instead it’s left leaking slime and seeing larvae wiggle up and down the length, thicker than the veins, feeling them crawl in and out of the balls and slit, repeatedly pressing against the prostate. The host certainly wouldn’t be allowed to even squeeze it without being bitten for threatening the larvae. Even touching something so senstive and inflamed would be borderline painful. But you could still encourage them. Imagine how you’d shiver as you drizzle honey over your length to feed them those sweet, concentrated calories — then as they start squirming in excitement you’re whiting out from pleasure… What was I talking about again?