Vreth is there, perched on one of the fleshspire's tentacles, cellophane tail-bell reaching up to press against her belly.

Her first words, barely intelligible, are: "I do not like it, Sam I Am."

"Hhhh, the germination is still viable."

"I'm very confused by the biology of this whole process," she remarks.

Vreth absently gestures at his crotch, at his pair of idealized humanoid cocks.

"Male. Female. We are not dichotic in this way. Up. Down. One from each recombines in a viable environment, such as a womb without a fertility cycle of its own, steeped in mana... Hhhhh. And the radiance of the Holy One nourishes us all, even as mindless tadpoles."

(Behind him, she can see... unconscious naked men, hung by their feet from strands of resin anchored far above, heads just barely touching the water.)

"That—"

She blinks, catching up with herself. Thoughts. She is having thoughts, like some sort of thinking creature. That's novel. What the hell are they talking about again? Right—

"—implies that you're," c'mon, words, what are the words for the thought she's having, she managed Dr. Seuss why can't she manage this, or maybe the question is how the hell did she manage the Dr. Seuss, "...obligate reproductive parasites? Or are there other suitable environments?"

"Yes."

His facepits flash.

The fleshspire bends down and extends its gelatinous tube-tongue. It squelches its slimy self into her cunt with zero resistance, and begins refilling her womb with fuck-pulses of radiant fluid.

Her body helpfully reminds her that it is stunningly desperate to be fucked. She tries to tell it that she's busy, dammit, having her first coherent conversation in weeks, and this should occupy a much higher priority than—but no. She bursts into tears as her thoughts dissolve in a bright wash of pleasure.

And when it's done, it's back to sensory deprivation for her. The slimy throat swallows her head again and smothers her tears along with her everything else above the neck.

She is

really

really

really

tired

of sensory deprivation.

Not thrilled about the constant sexual torture, either.

Orgasmic birth by orgasmic birth, another month crawls by.

Is she done yet?

She is not done yet.

How about now?

No.

How about—?

At this point she's starting to feel like she is never going to be done, actually. It's getting harder and harder to hold onto the idea that at some point her life is going to be shaped a different way from this. She knows on an intellectual level that forever is a very long time, but on an immediate level, abstractions like eternity are rapidly escaping her grasp. No matter what she does, it comes back to this. No matter what she thinks, it comes back to this. Is the outside world even real, or is it a dream she made up in a futile effort to distract herself from her ongoing torment?

The ongoing torment has no opinion.

Finally, finally, her womb is empty. Ish. She can still feel the something that exists and drinks in the light, flooding her body with carnal urgency.

Finally, finally, her lungs start to burn, and the fleshspire frees her head once more.

Vreth is not there to greet her, this time.

So, before anything else, she's gonna spend like at least a solid ten minutes crying.

Unless something interrupts her in the middle, but she kind of really hopes that nothing will.

Nothing interrupts her.

Distantly, there are faint moans of both pleasure and despair. More men than before are hanging head-first into the lake. There is more going on, now. The brain Horror's operation has evidently progressed. Just barely visible, around the shore, there are other heavily gravid torsos protruding from the bodies of other fleshspires.

Her first glimpse of the things she's been giving birth to all this time: about a foot of greenish jelly-flesh, with four frilled tails propelling them through the water, and a tapering hemi-cylindrical body.

She is almost certain that whatever's up with those men is going to turn out to be really, really bad. Possibly worse than what's going on with her.

Seeing other girls in her same situation doesn't exactly fill her with delight either.

And the eldritch tadpoles... she shudders. She doesn't want to think about them. She doesn't want to remember what it feels like when—she just doesn't want to think about them, okay?

(At some point in the past, she's pretty sure, she wasn't desperately, terrifyingly horny. She is almost completely certain that happened. She has only the vaguest idea what it would have been like.)

There isn't much for her to do, except think.

Well, she may observe as one of those tadpoles swims up to one of the unconscious men who is dangling close enough for her to see it clearly when it wriggles out of the water and latches on to his head.

The man twitches. His hands are glued together behind his back but he doesn't seem to be awake in any case.

And she is left alone to watch, as over the next few hours, the tadpole turns purplish-gray, just like Vreth. Its five limbs grow to resemble Vreth's not-face, and the purplish coloration spreads, to the man's chest, to his legs. Slowly, his arms and penis begin to divide.

Oh.

So that's happening.

She was right, that's worse.

Very early on in this process, she takes a deep breath and summons all the focus she can muster.

They took away her transformation aria. But is it gone, or is it just forgotten? Could she still use it, if she found out what it was?

What would it be, if she still had it? What are the words that define her soul?

She tries out various phrasings, muttering them under her breath whenever she assembles something plausible. From weakness, strength... no, not quite... but she can't wait for something to feel right, she has to try as many guesses as she can because it's very likely that if she manages to stumble on the right one she won't recognize it until it works...

It doesn't seem like it's gone or forgotten, actually. It feels like she still knows it. She can still see the words etched at the center of her soul, figuratively scan them with her figurative eyes, even. The individual words just fail to coalesce when she tries to assemble letters into sounds and meaning.

At the same time, there do not appear to be any words missing from her vocabulary.

Out on the lake, the unfortunate man continues to mutate. His dicks separate, getting bigger and prettier all the while. His arms follow shortly. He has a tail now, but lacks the cellophane bell. His muscles smooth and harden, and his feet widen and sprout claws.

She—

(closes her eyes so she'll stop thinking about how much she wants that poor stranger to fuck her)

—thinks.

It's not erased, not forgotten, it's—obfuscated. Blocked. She can see it but she can't... think it?

Well, which words match the ones she can't quite think?

Piece by piece, she fits a sentence together. Weak and strong are in there, and but, and I—no, I am—and—enough? Weak, but strong enough? That scans. That sounds like a way her soul might choose to describe her.

There's another clause, though, and that one's slipperier. She chases it around in circles for what feels like an hour before she finally figures out that it rhymes.

Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough...

But when she tries to say it, say it properly, she can't. That's blocked too.

She snarls very quietly and tries again. Repeats it over and over in her head, murmurs the phrases quietly without the force of a true incantation, tries to get the rhythm of it installed so deeply in her muscle memory that her voice will say the words without her having to think about it at all.

Brief, but long enough; weak, but strong enough; I am Hollow Witch Scintilla!

Does she even have all the right words? It's hard to know for sure. But as best she could determine, checking and double-checking, all the words are there and in the right order. It's the best she's got.

She can hold the sentence in her mind just fine, so long as she manages not to think of it as her aria. (A sentence identical to her aria works just fine, though.)

But to bring it out of herself, it is kind of fundamentally required that she think of what she's saying as her aria. (Or is it?)

The new horrorspawn awakens.

He whips his tail around, melting the resin on his feet and wrists. Four arms spring free, and the glue holding him aloft parts. He falls into the lake, flips over, and swims gracefully to shore.

He pauses, at Scintilla's fleshspire.

And his facepits flash.

And the fleshspire bends down to fuck and fill her with its gelatinous tube-tongue again, before swallowing her head and plunging her back into the darkness and silence for another month of frustration and nigh-orgasmic birthing.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE

This time, when the fleshspire releases her from her sensory deprivation, Vreth is there. She can feel herself being unglued, her limbs released, as her lungs start to burn. Strong hands collect her, and the slimy throat spits out her head, leaving her supported in Vreth's arms.

On the way back to the alcoves, away from the lake, it is obvious that they've come a long way. Patrols of the humanoid horrorspawn wander the fleshscape. Through glimpses she can see other girls in the alcoves, bent over, heads wrapped in tentacles as they're fucked from behind, their muffled moans and screams blending into a dull murmur.

She desperately, desperately wants what those girls are getting.

It seems likely that she's in for exactly that.

She can't seem to stop crying, which is annoying because she doesn't want to let them eat any more of her emotions if she can help it. Yes, yes, they all seem to grow back, but it's the principle of the thing.

She'd also like to talk to Vreth again, but she's sobbing too hard to speak even if she could think of anything to say. Dr. Seuss can't save her this time.

She is, indeed, in for exactly that.

Vreth glues her down on her knees, and leaves.

And then a procession of the newer vreth-a-likes line up to...

(They're not trying to impregnate her this time, she's still got that proto-whatever in her womb, so they don't bother to switch off between upper and lower cocks. She's got two holes and is covered in slippery slime. They can and do use both at once.)

...fuck her and suck on her brain. The tentacles are tight and muffling but positively spacious after the fleshspire's throat.

These ones are rougher with her. Acting on instinct rather than experience. But they have decent physical instincts.

Lust, being such a feature of her brain right now, features heavily on the menu, but it's almost like they're too weak to drain it more than she feels it. There's so much that it never quite burns out. They switch to feeding on something else the moment sex falls below 'bigger than everything else in this brain combined'.