Malignant growth and unholy resilience.

Shock still consumed the poor girl. Only now had she noticed the violet light of the magic circle had faded as she lay back on her elbows, watching this tumorous, sickly spawn--her chid--sup at her breast, seeking the lifegiving mother's milk within. Althea coughed softly when in its zeal, the squirming bastard brat tightned its coil around her neck while lassoing a second of its left arm tendrils around the base of her plump, ripened tit. With the precision of a skilled farmhand, the tentacle squeezed over the expanse of her heavy breast from base to nip, wringing the spoiled, nauseating milk free like she was some sort of cursed cattle. Against her sense of dignity, Althea felt a small shudder escape her pursed lips. Despite the humiliation, she felt a warmth blossoming in her strained loins.

As the thing drained her breasts, so too did the amusement drain from the gathered men. Andre snapped his fingers, signalling Izaac and Felix to heft up the bulk of Ivan's corpse. The three men exited without a word, leaving the crawler-laden Edgar to keep watch over the girl. She lay there with heavy breaths, labored and fatigued from the strenuous birth. He began pacing around her like a cat stalking its prey. If the cat was covered in clumsy, tumbling maggots and persistent, frenetic flies. The others had left them alone, which lit a small spark of hope in Althea's chest. She had slain one of them with a single spell. Perhaps she would find an opportunity to do so again. This thought was quickly shunted from her mind, as her unwanted heir detached itself from her breast with a wet shlorp before latching onto the other nip.

"He'z a hungry little one. Az greedy az hiz father, I zuppoze," he mused. "You've done well, my zweet. He iz a fine zpezimen. A magnifizent tribute to hiz father's will." Althea couldn't help but notice Edgar was not looking at her at all any more, but at her child. Was he so enraptured by the hideous thing? Was he waiting for something?

And yet, before she could ponder the thought, she felt a quivering pulse shake through the spawn's whole body. A deep oscillation. And unless her mind was playing tricks, it felt as though her newborn bastard had almost instantly doubled in weight... and size. Looking down proved it. She winced as it finally put its third tentacle to use. The one on her neck remained anchored in in a loose, fleshy noose. The one on her second tit resumed its milking motions. But the third had a more insidious intent. This tiny, foul abomination let its tendril snake down the sticky skin of her recently deflated tummy before coming to rest at the top of her mound. There it smeared its slimy secretions all across the underside of her navel and between her hips.

Althea's eyes shot open wide. Surely it didn't intend to violate her... right? She was its mother, even if it only showed the scarcest signs of humanity. Yet when it finally finished its milky binging, she saw the beginnings of its transformation. The thing's face no longer bore the soft, spongy features of a newborn. Its visage looked gaunt and skull-like, with sharp cheekbones, a pointed chin. The puckered, suckling sphincter of a mouth had stretched and twisted into a fanged, ghoulish maw. More monster than mortal, but still it remained the fruit of her loins. Edgar let out a deep and dark laugh before squatting down between Althea and the cell door. He wished to watch, it would seem.

When she felt it loosen its grip on her neck, Althea quickly shook the inhuman spawn off of her and scurried away toward the back of her small, stone cell. She couldn't tell if she had good timing or of what followed was in reaction to her rejection, but the Heir of Nihilipox once again shook and shuddered. Its flesh bulged and swelled in odd places, like the surface of a boiling stew or swiftly-rising bread dough. At once it gained an amorphous shape before the rest of it seemed to grow in proportion, evening out its limbs and figure into a new, more horrific form. When the twisting and warping of flesh subsided, she saw a somewhat humanoid shape lying in a fetal position on its side. Its back was to her, and by her judgment it must have been only a head shorter than her.

"By Helestria's light..." Althea murmured, and upon hearing its mother speak, the prone, curled-up creature stirred with a wet, throaty hiss. Its clawed, six-fingered arm slapped against the floor, bent at an angle no mortal could replicate without dislocating their shoulder. Patches of the skin had stretched so quickly that numerous holes tore open, like fabric stretched beyond its limits. She could see the dark, rotten muscle moving beneath with each motion. Althea's wretched spawn hoisted itself upright with a swift, jerky motion, still facing away. In place of its skirt of leg-tentacles, it now had a pair of digitigrade legs ending in goat-like hooves covered in the familiar black fungus. In fact, it seemed to leave a small, slowly-spreading patch of the black mold everywhere it stepped. The priestess saw the mix of awe and terror on Edgar's face. Gone was the fly-covered man's arrogance and lewd leering. He bore a countenance of abject horror.

With a wet popping sound, the creature's triple-tentacled left arm snapped into its socket, adjusting to the increased length and girth of each rope-like appendage, now each the breadth of a man's forearm. From this angle, Althea counted no fewer than a dozen knife-length bony protrusions jutting out of the stooped abomination's spinal column. In that moment, Edgar actually took a step back toward the prison cell entrance, his eyes glancing at the door ajar. When the Heir let out a gurgling roar, Edgar tried to turn and slam the door shut behind him, but he only made it a single step before the spawn had one tentacle around his throat the other two around each of his arms at the wrists.

"No-ghlkk--Mazter! N-Nihilipoxz! Protect m--" Edgar pleaded through the constricting tentacle's embrace, but it was in vain. Before he could finish his cry for help, the spawn yanked him back and plunged its six-clawed hand into the man's back and through the front of his chest, up to the elbow. Clutched in its black-nailed grasp was the man's still-beating heart. Edgar groaned once before slumping limply in the Heir's grip. It tossed him aside before at last turning to face its mother.

Althea beheld the face of her firstborn son, the Heir of Nihilipox. Its gaunt, skull-like face was long and stretched beyond human measure, not unlike some kind of deer or elk. The sickly, bile-yellow skin still clung to its face, and it still sported the porous honeycombed eye. Purple worms danced in and out of the holes like a crowd of revelers. Its fanged, ghoulish maw now seemed to fight against a constant fusing of translucent, yellow flesh, as if its lips were magically fusing themselves shut. As such, it tore ragged holes in the taut mouth flesh each time it opened its long jaw. And that grin reached from ear-to-ear-- though the thing had no discernable ears. A singular, gnarled and twisted horn sprouted asymmetrically from the right side of its forehead, just above the ocean blue eye. Althea had seen identical blue eyes each time she looked in the mirror. It was the only resemblance to her that her mutant son bore, but it chilled her to the bone.

The child-sized beast brought the quiet and tremorless heart of Edgar before its noseless, monstrous face. At once it snapped open its jaw and tore its melded lips with sickening determination. Althea could actually hear the thing shiver with delight at its self-inflicted pain. Before the flesh could knit itself together again, the Heir of Nihilipox bared its yellow fangs and black gums before feasting on the dead man's heart in demonic, cannibalistic glee. Its bloodsoaked maw rasped a gluttonous belch. Fed maternal nourishment and a dead man's heart. Milk and blood brought upon the Heir newfound and nightmarish changes.

From its height at a head shorter than Althea, the spawn quivered and flexed with low, sadomasochistic rumbles of pleasure and pain entwined. Again it swelled outward, its muscles bulging in asymmetrical growth. Claws sharpened, fangs pointed, and overall the beast's muscle mass and height blossomed. Her demonic son now stood a head taller than even Andre. If it tried to leave the cell, it would have to duck its head--and horn--below the doorframe. The abomination's three arm tentacles had split into six, though strands of the thick, viscous mucus still clung between them. Surely, this must have been an expected part of the ritual. But was this even its final form?

This sadistic fiend had gestated within her what seemed only mere moments ago, and yet its cold, baleful stare... the grotesque transfiguration... it all felt as if time stretched thin over eons. And in that moment, Althea knew. The gloaming, fermented soul that flickered behind its familiar and familial blue eye was as a shard of the Abyss itself. A fragment of Nihilipox nested within this horrific thing--this rotten fruit of their unholy union.