A Sort of Amusement

The beast that came from the egg was a ganglionic, wobbling thing the color of burnt caldera stone streaked with purple bioluminescence. It staggered and jerked toward her, the black canyon walls of flame about the court casting long shadows like spider’s legs behind it. In a perverse way, it was almost arachnid-like. But everything about it twists wrongly, bends the opposite way than would be expected. A fat black body the width and length of a palm suspended by wrong-jointed legs, stammering toward her and blinking some deep-nightmare combination of both eye and mouth. It stumbles, falls, and flips, turning the orifice to the underside of it and bending the joints the opposite way. Right-side up but still at wrong angles. A grotesquery too horrible to be designed and too haphazard to be natural.

Morgana extended a hand down toward it and allowed it to climb onto her palm. It seemed to measure her for a moment before it slipped the legs around the back of her hand and pressed down over her palm, fat body stretching and distending to cover the surface skintight and the awkward joints locking in behind to hold itself in place. It pressed the hybrid orifice against her palm with the nervous, fumbling intensity of a virgin trying to undress its lover. Something halfway between a tongue and a set of genitals pressed against her palm repeatedly. Everything about the creature optimized for multiple purposes. A weapon, a tool, no matter how you were to cut it. In the form she **** it to assume, too primitive of one to be effective. Perhaps whatever sent it didn’t account for somebody like her finding it. It would have been hard to have accounted for her.

The value of a thing can only be found in the use of it. She would have thought differently once. The Black Court and the tangible court had both changed her perception. Justice was not the thing in the box, it was not the city. It was the stones laid on streets which would see blood shed. It was the box. In the shadows cast by the light of the ideal of justice, there lay both the hurt and the redemption of it. A weapon in the hand, trying with no success and no charm to couple with her palm, was a weapon in the hand. The ideal was the coupling, the true justice was the failure.

She unlinked the chain with her other hand and chose one who had atoned for almost all of her ills. In the moment the chain is made manifest she exists interlocked with the other sinners. Her arms and legs bound together to link her in a Promethean bent-backed lock. Her legs covering the eyes of the next in the chain, her eyes covered by the legs of the one before her. When she is freed from the chain, she blinks but remains locked as a link. Her skin like dark rattan is criss-crossed with scars, the arm returned to her in the Black Court still with the paler pink new flesh of a scar. She is not unbound to bow, and she does not.

“My Queen.”

“Sevika, I am here to give you your final redemption, if you will bear it.”

“I have not failed you before.”

“This challenge will be like nothing before, I do not know the full extent of what it will entail. Bear it and be redeemed.”

The subject has borne her punishments, some likely harsher. This is an exceptional case. There is no justice, at least not truly, in subjecting a sinner to a punishment of unknown nature and severity. But at the same time, the only way to measure a punishment’s severity is in employment. She would test it upon herself in any other case, but there are things which may harm even the mighty. For now, the worst thing she can suffer is still freedom from the chain.

In a moment she is bound again in shape, arms back behind her gripping her own heels, chest extended out and body arced. The lean muscle of her form stretched out as if meat in a market display. She has been viewed like this before, she shows no emotion. When Morgana raises her hand and she sees the unknowable thing, all spindly limbs and sickly flesh, her face betrays her for just a moment. Something perhaps as primal as fear, even in the dark court, or perhaps something far more or far less complex.

The next moment the creature hops down from her hand and off of the arm of the throne. It pilots itself both by command and by autonomous intent. For a few steps it seems to struggle to propel itself on the misshapen legs it has given itself, fighting against gravities it did not predict. Then it scuttles like an insect with surprising speed, prodding Sevika once with an outstretched leg. The points find purchase on her skin without digging in or harming her, gripping and tactile like feeler arms. Something like disgust blooms on her face, this far more uncontrolled than anything before.

For a moment, it is ambiguous what the creature will do next. It stands on Sevika’s thigh at an almost vertical angle with no effort and holds in place. The muscles of the woman’s thigh bulge and shift as if to try and buck it free, but if it notices this it shows no sign. The dark brown of her pussy peeks out from a patch of salt-and-pepper hair, but she seems almost to try and tuck it out of sight as much as she can in her restrained position. Her breasts rise and fall slowly as she tries to breathe deeply with her chest, looking away from the thing resting on her. The probing underside of the creature can grip, suckling like a mouth, but it can also penetrate. Given the choice of either, what it decides on speaks a lot to the intent of it.

With insect speed it creeps up past her waist and up over her stomach. Her breathing quickens, face pulling harder away from it and eyes squeezing shut. They shoot open again as the misjointed jumble of legs start to lock around the sides of her head. The mass of the body settling over her mouth and nose like a mask. They lock wide open in fear, her head shaking from side to side. Slowly, her movements subside, her eyelids drooping. Broken by occasional animal spasms, but energy fading and eventually vanishing. The steady rise and fall of her chest takes on the deep evenness of sleep. Eyes never closing, stuck in the halfway state of somebody ****, moving slowly around the room and settling with confused semi-emotion on Morgana on her throne.

Morgana waited, watching with interest. As with the creature, she knew Sevika and her mind on a deep enough level to be able to measure the both of them. The woman’s **** shudders as the penetrating organ, slick with the anesthetic and a mild aphrodisiac chemical she’s currently being subjected to, slithers thinly down her throat, almost to her stomach. It doesn’t fully obey the laws of space and matter. Sevika’s breathing exits and enters her body through it, air not so much filtering through the tissue so much as just ignoring it. Ceasing to exist for an inch of space and then reappearing on the other side. The thing, for all of the human mind at the core and the animal shape of it, is made simply of non-stuff. Things effectively alien enough as to be like magic.

The body of the thing convulses, something like an anticipatory shudder. Sevika’s **** mind protests as the penetrating organ in her throat starts to distend in her throat. At the base near the body, a distinct shape the size of a fist forms and begins to trail into her throat. By all likelihood, the woman could not have accommodated it on her own. It goes past her jaw, bulging in her throat as it continues down past her collarbone, becoming invisible again for the last stretch before reaching the end of the tube and sliding free. It lands in her stomach, sending a deep rumble through her guts. She can’t feel her body, a numbness of growing warmth overtaking all senses. Giving her a full-body flush. The body over her face convulses again, the process begins anew.

Sevika remains calm if only by remaining ****. Everything that the creature does, there is a great sense of fragility to. This thing, to some extent, is a mistake. It is making the best of the shape it has made itself. The eggs are incomplete genetic material, they lack the fertilizing aspect needed to actually create young. They have soft, fragile shells, but they’re too large to get by unharmed otherwise. The limbs locked around her head are easily broken, the covering of her face is incomplete. It seems stuck between two different forms. It wants to be a brood parasite. It wants to lay eggs in a female and have them fertilized by a male of the same species. But it is also trying to spawn eggs in a stomach like a bodily parasite. The shape of it is better adapted for joining with a sex organ than a face, but the toxin only works if ingested. It is a beautiful, unique failure. For now, the great value in it is the wondering and feeling out of what it might become.

One egg becomes two in the span of about a minute. Two becomes four in two minutes. The creature stays on Sevika’s face long enough that the taut skin of her stomach starts to deform and distend slightly as it fills her with egg after egg. It took Morgana a second to realize that she hadn’t wondered if the creature would ever stop when she began the exercise. She checked and groaned. Seemingly, in no part of the brain does any sort of stop signal exist. It could keep going until the victim’s organs burst and never notice. Something that serves nobody to happen. With a snap of her fingers she finally recalls it.

The creature shuddered and then dropped suddenly as if struck dead, limbs unlocking from Sevika’s head and twitching at its sides. Sevika’s eyes remained clouded, her body still shifting slightly in place, tongue lolling and a trail of mixed saliva and toxins beginning to trail onto her now more rounded stomach. The insides of her thighs had become streaked with her own wetness, delicate pink peeking from between the dark lips of her pussy. With a snap, Morgana could have brought her fully back to her senses. Instead, she let the **** abate naturally.

Slowly, as the sense started to creep back into Sevika’s face, the acid of her stomach started to become more hostile to the foreign presence. As the woman’s discomfort and displeasure grew more apparent, her stomach started to deflate somewhat anticlimactically. By the time she could clear her throat in discomfort and look meaningfully at Morgana, she was halfway back to normal.

“Have I done well?”

Morgana compelled the creature to rise again and it wobbled back over toward her, settling back in her lap.

“What do you recall of the experience? It seemed as though you were **** for most of it.”

Sevika shook her head and shuddered.

“It felt longer than it probably was. It was like being caught half-awake, paralyzed.”

“Did you suffer?”

Sevika scrunched her face.

“It was not pleasant, I never wanted to feel my body used that way. But it did not hurt, that was part of what made it so strange.”

Morgana reached down and set a hand on the creature in her lap. She stared at Sevika in silence for a short time, resting her cheek on her other fist.

“Forgive me, subject, I made you a victim of something I didn’t fully understand myself.”

“I was proud to serve.”

“No, you were willing to serve so long as it freed you.”

“Sabe sa,” Sevika lapsed into her native language. The phrase, one both of them had always liked. Roughly translated it meant “And what about it?”. Morgana smiled.

“By your honesty be free, if not your trials.”

Sevika rose, unbound for the first time since her ****. She rubbed her wrists almost out of habit, then reached for her throat in discomfort. Even as the effects of the experiment faded, the memories didn’t. She then bowed of her own will.

“Do as you will.” Morgana raised her free hand as she continued to caress the creature.

“Perhaps in another life, soon. For now, I wish only to rest. Perhaps to dream.”

“You will find no dreams where you go. This has all been the dream, and we the dreamers. Where you go now, you go to wake.”

Sevika nodded, rose, and stepped from the court.

The creature whispered into her mind even as it lay still, Morgana shrugged.

“If she wanted to, she could have asked.”

It had a voice like a lugubrious wet cough, the tone and feeling of it could change in less space than a full syllable, every word it said dripped with a form of contempt for the very idea of things that lived and walked independent of other creatures. And still somehow it spoke with reverence to her, as a worshiper to a deity. It was not the first time she had heard the tone.

“I understand you liked her. It’s not like we won’t see her again. If I need it to be that way, I can make it that way. Rest, regain your strength, I have many more experiments for you to perform.”

She only half-imagined the exhausted shudder it gave as she stroked the clammy flesh with one hand. She stared into the endless wall at the edge of the court and waited until it began to sleep. Then she walked through fitful dreams as color in the monochrome. She stripped and killed a shred of ego as a hunter cleaning their way through a flock. And here as a conquered moon turned in the sky she spoke of how no living thing could ever own the world. Even if it did not understand her arguments, it believed them to the word.