Mega-Milk starts to suggest retreating into the flesh tunnel and closing it off, when Eyeball-Endowment gestures toward the approaching wolves and twists her mana into a braid, lighting up the [Attack], [Seek], [Channel], [Glow] and [Charge] runenodes within herself.

A ball of violent mana forms at the tip of one of her grabber-tentacles, humming with violence as she wrestles it into shape. As soon as it is cooperating, she lights up [Projectile].

The ball of mana blasts away from her, screaming through the air toward the wolves, a thread of glowing mana trailing behind itself, a thread maintaining a connection back to Eyeball-Endowment. With barks of alarm the wolves scatter. It doesn't matter. With a twist of will, the hurtling ball of violent mana splits into four, four strings trailing back, controlling each as they home in on of the wolves.

Four brief but agonized yips precede four explosions of mud, bog-water, and wolf-flesh.

Mega-Milk and Tail-Pussy-Head hold still all of their tentacles in protest.

"That was not necessary, Eydow!" Tail-Pussy-Head objects.

"You don't know that, Taud."

Mega-Milk squishes her breasts together in worry. "That settlement surely knows we're here, now."

"Are they dead?" Talance (or rather, Tentacle-Balance) asks in a soft psychic whisper.

Tail-Pussy-Head wraps one of her motive-skirt nub-tentacles around the little fleshball in comfort, and Talance clings, growing a crude set of hips with a couple of vulvas to grind against the slick, wiggling nubs.

"Well. Let's go talk to the settlement. Hopefully they aren't fond of furry-teeth-canids."

Kamryn isn't in the village, but she's hanging out nearby waiting for Vinely to get back from visiting his family, when she feels it.

It's spectacular.

If the tribesmen are like a bonfire, and Vinely is like a hot bath, this, this radiance shines like the sun. It is a vast, fathomless, omnipresent blaze that bathes the world in its light... while being still and calm and steadier than the staidest mountain.

Kamryn darts through the marsh, circumnavigating the village toward where she can feel the unquenchable radiance.

The tribe has a few of its own mages, but none of them can do anything like that.

The warriors scramble to arm themselves and organize, alarmed by the blatant display of high-level magic on their doorstep.

As the first of them hurry out of the village, they're briefly distracted by the sight of Kamryn's naked backside, jogging away from them. Then one of them spots the terrifying (and uncomfortably sensual) mass of entwined slimy flesh on an intercept course, and shouts a warning.

A human! They didn't have a chance to bring any with them but human Lovers are common enough. It is a reassuring and relieving sight.

The numerous furry figures with sharp metal things on sticks behind the human are not reassuring. Eyeball-Endowment starts to entwine her mana in preparation for another attack spell, only for Tail-Pussy-Head to restrain her.

"Wait, I think those are humans too!"

A large number of eyes blink. "Oh. So they are. That's so weird. Why are they so, gnarled. And hairy?"

Mega-Milk's shrug sends ripples through the retinue.

Kamryn has never seen anything like this before. She's, of course, noticed the common theme among almost everything that feels lust out in the marsh: the sinuous form of long, slithery, slippery appendages that are good for finding and filling a body's holes. This is that, but purified. Exemplified.

It's beautiful.

The three creatures in the lead look like they have humanoid shapes, with faces and torsos and limbs arranged symmetrically on either side, though the limbs themselves vary widely from mere arms and legs. There's one with a skirt of thick nubbed tentacles holding her up, and a bunch of thick tubed tentacles with fleshy mouths on the ends growing from her head, but normal humanoid arms. There's one with normal humanoid legs but eyes where her vulva, bellybutton, breasts, and shoulders should be, with a variety of thick dexterous tentacles, including more eyes, growing like lids or lashes around the shoulder-eyes instead of arms, but with a vulva peeking out between the base of each one. The face is almost normal, framed by actual hair. The last is plump and curvy, with impossibly enormous breasts, a tentacle sprouting from each nipple, and a bunch more in phallic form from her crotch area, which was split into three pairs of hips meeting at the butt, and six thigh-thick tentacles with grabby ends in place of legs.

They're all tangled together, various tentacles looped around or slithering over flesh here and there, none of them untouched by another, but most of the tentacles are long and nimble enough that they don't need to move in lockstep to remain in contact. Behind the three humanoids come a few dozen more stranger beings: simple balls of tentacles, as well as a few scattered unique things, and, more humanoids... at least from the neck down, with shiny purplish skin and spectacularly buxom figures, but with round flesh-flower mouths as big as heads, in the place of heads.

"Hello!" Kamryn calls. "My name is Kamryn and this is our tribe's village. Who are you and where have you come from?"

The human makes a complicated series of vocal sounds, far too quickly to interpret the emotion behind most of them, and the only meaning that comes through is a low murmur of fuck-me-fuck-me-you-should-fuck-me.

Humans are always saying that. Even the gnarled dirty ones brandishing pointy metal are whispering it. But this human is almost certainly trying to communicate something else in addition to that.

Tail-Pussy-Head takes the initiative, as she is wont to do. She thinks hard, and tries to repeat the one verbal-word she did catch. Humans verbalizing their own names or the names of others is a concept she's familiar with. "Kam... ryn?"

It doesn't occur to her, though, that just because the human is saying something besides you-should-fuck-me that she shouldn't provide the poor neglected creature with some stimulation. So, as she slithers forward, a pair of her head-tails reach out and open up, seeking to latch on and suckle the human's breasts as an opening greeting.

Kamryn isn't sure what's happening here. She doesn't think they actually understood her question. But she trusts her extra sense and her breasts are already tingling with anticipatory pleasure at the sight of those slick, slimy orifices reaching out to suckle her. She steps closer, making herself easier to reach-

One of the tribeswoman mages knows Kamryn's secret. She's kept it to herself all this time, afraid that a confrontation would drive Kamryn away entirely. She couldn't hide her horror the first time she saw Kamryn bring home food for the tribe, food birthed from Kamryn's own body, result and proof that the girl had been caught and raped by at least one of the monstrous pod-plants that covered the Grey and violated anyone who got close enough.

Kamryn had always been touched in the head, she knows. It was obvious, those dead eyes staring placidly out of a beautiful child's face. There's something deeply wrong with the girl, something that makes her incapable or unwilling to protect herself. Why. Every time, she comes back with more rapespawn to give to the cooks. It never stops. It never gets less frequent. Kamryn never learns better. She just keeps venturing out and getting raped no matter what anyone says to her.

The girl could not. Would not. Refused to, protect herself.

And now the girl is practically throwing herself into the clutches of a horde of disgusting Tentacled abominations.

It's too much. Too far. If the girl refuses to protect herself, then she'll have to do it for her. "Get away from her!!! Banchirr talmello!"

It's her most powerful combat spell. A deadly jet of fine sand, a continuous blast that she could maintain until her target was dead. She aims it at the abomination's head, before it can get its slimy tentacles on Kamryn.

Eyeball-Endowment has a shimmering shield up in an instant, but-

With a snarl of frustration, Kamryn throws herself in front of the spell, braces, gets her arms up to protect her face.

She doesn't scream in pain, but it's a close thing, as the sand rips the flesh from her arms and sprays blood and mulched flesh all over the Tentacled's shield spell. The force of it pushes her back, her feet sliding on the wet ground, her regeneration unable to keep up with the rate that flesh is being torn from her arms. Her bones hold up, though, meaning she won't have to regrow her hands.

Then it stops.

Kamryn slowly lowers her arms, hissing at the feel of her regeneration dislodging so much sand as flesh spreads down her arms, restoring her to pristine condition.

The look of horror the tribe's Earth Mage is giving her is surprisingly similar to the look she gave Kamryn all those years ago.

"What just happened?!"

"I think one of them tried to kill us and the Lover defended us?"

"Forget it. We're retreating. We'll fortify the maw and come up with some other approach."

"What about the Lover?!"

"We can't afford to lose anyone in a conflict! We'll figure out what to do once we're not under threat!"

The retinue and the princesses pull back, departing the human village.

An argument ensues as soon as the Tentacled are gone.

Unusually, it's Kamryn who starts it. "What is wrong with you?! Why did you attack them?!"

     "Me?!?! I can't believe you'd defend those things! Do you have any idea what they were going to do to you?! You fucking well should by now!!!"

"They were friendly before you started blasting!"

     "You are a deluded, broken child and I'm not going to stand by and watch you get violated!"

"Then look away," Kamryn snarls in pure rage, angrier than she's ever been in her life as the Earth Mage's motivations begin to make sense. "You've all been lying to me my entire life! You're the deluded one here. ALL OF YOU ARE! But I could always see the truth you wanted to hide from me."

     "What truth?!?!"

Kamryn's voice is ice cold. "That in this story, you are the villains. And the creatures that just want to mate with us, are the innocents."

It feels like the entire tribe tries to shout a response to this at once, the babble of outraged voices rising over each other at the revelation that their precious-if-distant tribesdaughter has not only been violated by various tentacled creatures out in the marsh during her long absences, but that she has been going back for more on purpose. That she prefers the company of monsters to the company of her tribe.

At least they're too busy yelling to complain about her nudity.

And on that note, Kamryn wonders. More than once, instead of ranging about in the marsh, Kamryn has simply gone home with Vinely and spent a week living among his bushel of leaf octopi. It didn't really feel that different than roaming the marsh in terms of amenities, so she's never really considered it an alternative to her village, but the thought has crossed her mind.

But now, they've, for-real, made contact with another tribe. Yes, the other tribe is Tentacled and alien, but... they have magic and purpose and... and presented with a choice that she's never had before, between two very different groups of people...

Kamryn isn't even listening to the yelling, now, and some of it's even turned against itself, arguments between other tribemembers about what to do. She can feel the last of her tenuous connection to these people dissolving in the face of literally any alternative. She's not, and has never been, theirs.

She turns, and leaves, and the tribe is too accustomed to seeing her naked backside vanish into the marsh to think that this time might be different, until it's too late.

When the nude human approaches the edge of their camp, Mega-Milk is in the midst of fleshcrafting some bone-reinforced walls as precaution against hostilities. A seducer chirps out a warning, and one of the Orbs floats over to grab the human and make sure she doesn't go anywhere.

It plunges a tentacle into each of her holes, because they're right there and wet and inviting, and if it is going to hold on to her anyway...

It doesn't expect the human to object, mostly because it is only familiar with the sorts of humans who do not, in fact, object, but also because, like all humans it has met, this one is murmuring a continuous silent stream of you-should-fuck-me.

Kamryn would be an idiot if she expected any different.

As the thick, slick, phallic tentacles plunge into her pussy, up her ass, and down her throat, she welcomes them eagerly. It's not an unfamiliar experience of course. If anything, this is better. These capital-T Tentacles are just... the experience of being fucked, perfected and refined. Warm and thick and slick and perfectly shaped to be as appealing as possible. And the way they move. It's like they know every secret of her flesh, rubbing against her insides in just the right way to milk as much pleasure from her body as possible, without any impression that this requires effort on the part of the tentacle orb.

As welcomes go, Kamryn has no complaints about this one, and if anything how'd it'd scandalize her tribe is a bonus, at this point. She settles in to wait, and get driven to orgasm over and over, while the Tentacled people finish raising their defensive walls and stuff.

It's nice to have this particular wild human confirmed as sane non-hostile.

She's more than just that, it turns out.

As the days pass, Kamryn works out what's going on with the Tentacled's psychic communication much faster than even she expects, and is able to meet the tentacle princesses halfway before the week is out.

For the Tentacled, their verbal language is almost entirely tonal. It's a proxy for emotion, first and foremost, and once Kamryn figures that out she can start conveying nuance that her psychic presence is unable to. From there, it's a short time before she can start teaching the tentacle princesses the lexical meanings of various words, and learning the few scattered pseudo-lexical meanings that have crept into the emotion-tone language over time.

All three tentacled princess are kind of impressed with this human. They'd already known about lexical-verbal-language, of course, but most humans, even the the ones who've been Lovers for decades or centuries, well, the three of them have never met someone who teaches it so well.

There's no such thing as formal Lover status, but it doesn't take long before Kamryn is considered one of their own. She even helps repel the one attempt by her former tribe to take Kamryn back.

The tentacle tribe, despite being sheltered and ignorant of the larger world in their own way, knows so much more than Kamryn does about what's out there. Once the communication barrier is down, they have stories, and Kamryn wants to hear them all. Vinely swings by to visit on occasion, and Kamryn is apologetic that she has less time for her leafy friend now, but as a demitentacled sapient, Vinely is welcomed by the tribe of exiles.

Sometimes one of her new Tentacled family will forget that lexical language requires a clear mouth, and stuff a tentacle down Kamryn's throat when she's trying to say something... but she doesn't hold it against them, especially since they just as often make the same mistake when they are trying to say something lexical and accidentally interrupt themselves. Very amusing when it happens, it makes Kamryn giggle.

Kamryn is fascinated by how much more to magic there is than throwing blasts at things and purifying water. Eydow is their specialist in that, while Taud and Megk are more proficient in the traditional (for Tentacleds) fleshcrafting practices. The entire concept of biology is a fantastic new world for Kamryn that she explores ravenously.

Talance is the one to suggest it. Kamryn could become a spellcaster herself. Her soul is robust and powerful. Taud or Megk could install a Runenode formation, no problem. Kamryn eagerly asks for this. Talance is happy she helped!

In addition to the rune core, Kamryn asks, after talking it over with all three princesses, for [Utility], [Protect], [Construct], [Sex], [Blood], and [Flesh]. Her reasoning is that she wants to be able to share her toughness, and defensive magic is the next best thing. Utility and Sex are obvious and need no explanation, that's just quality of life and common sense; it's honestly weird that those are separate Runenodes, Megk opines. Blood and Flesh are also pretty obvious: after hearing so much about it, Kamryn really really wants to become a fleshcrafter. Maybe her old tribe wouldn't have treated her the way they did, if she could've made them all as pretty as she was.

Kamryn is deposited in an enclosed tentacle pit to help keep her stable during the installation, and Taud tells her to relax as Kamryn gently drifts to sleep in its fleshy embrace.

With a cooperative (for a generous definition of "cooperative" granted, but Kamryn is emphatically within the much less generous definitions) human, it becomes possible for the Tentacled exiles to start repopulating a bit. Not a lot. Just a bit to fill out their ranks without becoming unwieldy for just three tentacle princesses to manage.

When they explain the concept, Kamryn balks hard at bearing the tentacle princesses a daughter. And not for any of the reasons less cooperative humans might have, either. It isn't until they explain that princesses are human-adjacent enough to have a period of childhood where they're pre-sexual, that Kamryn's emotions rebel. Loving and caring for something she's not on and can't be on sexual terms with? She just... she just can't.

That's fine, the tentacle princesses reassure her. If the tentacle princesses really want a daughter, they can breed with each other, though that takes a lot out of them and requires a lot of fleshcrafting to make viable. That's what makes princesses unique, though.

No, they just want to expand the retinue, which can't be done without a human, and should be fine since pits, gazers, orbs, worms, seducers, and the like, don't have childhoods. They're born with comprehensive instincts and fully operative sexualities, and then develop personalities over time.

Yeah, Kamryn is perfectly fine with that. Don't scare her like that.

Of course, the only reason they even asked in the first place is because Kamryn has total control of her own fertility, which they only noticed after trying to impregnate her with a couple of tentacle orbs without asking first. Kamryn is fine with that too, she decides. It's not like any of the Grey's local demitentacled ever asked first either, and giving birth to various things that she does not have to then raise from a position of non-sexual emotional attachment is just another part of sex, for her, and often a fun part.

When Kamryn learns about crest tattoos, she even asks for one that'll make her better and faster at gestating and birthing Tentacleds. Eydow helpfully applies one, combining it with another she knows about that should help protect her mind and sexuality from anything trying to warp it. It flares up in pink light on her pubis mons, active constantly as she is almost never without a tentacle on or in her somewhere, and every Tentacled touch causes the tattoo to glow and amplify her pleasure. It makes her twice as fast at gestating new Tentacled, and every time she gives birth it flares up with a brilliant pink light as it takes her pleasure and wrenches it up to where she has constant mind-shattering orgasms through the whole process.

As she learns more Fleshcrafting, Talance volunteers to let Kamryn practice on her. It's helpful for both of them, with Talance able to undo any mistakes and let Kamryn start over at will, and with Kamryn able to shape Talance's flesh into forms she hasn't quite learned yet, accelerating the little flesh blob's growth into a proper changeling. With so much practice, Kamryn gets very good at it, even for her base learning speed, which is high.

Kamryn starts applying mutations to herself, anything that strikes her fancy.

She turns her tongue into a much longer prehensile tongue, to start. She makes her body more receptive to sexual fluids. She discovers how to give her own vagina a poor imitation of the innate healing effect Tentacled fluids have, though this has a side effect of making her extra aware of the emptiness of not having anything stuffed into her hole. Thankfully not having anyone's tentacle or cock or tentacle-cock or whatever in her pussy is a pretty rare occurrence. She tweaks her joints and tendons, making herself supernaturally flexible. On a whim she even adds small tentacles to the inside of her vagina, just for the fun of being able to grope things while they're penetrating her, and decides to keep them when she finds that they help a little with the side effect of the healing-fluid change, just in case she's ever separated from her tribe and can't keep a [Construct] dildo going.

And then, Kamryn starts learning about her new tribe's history.

Talance has grown up a lot, thanks to Kamryn. She can take on a passible human form, even, and often fucks around looking like a palette-swapped Kamryn, or when the mood strikes (either her or Kamryn or both at the same time), a genderswapped version of Kamryn.

One of the seducers, the newer ones, that Kamryn gave birth to herself, starts hanging around them. She doesn't have an anatomical name but when asked what she should be called she makes a sound like, "Uuloo." She's attentive and patient and spontaneously helpful whenever something she can help with comes up.

Then there's Eydow's protégé. A young gazer practicing with [Attack] and [Protect] and [Illusion], who is fascinated by lexical language and learns to speak out loud even better than the tentacle princesses. She names herself, "Yosaphen." and takes to challenging Kamryn to shield-magic contests.

The final member of their little group is an armor mimic that they meet when he crawls up out of the maw in the center of their  little Pinkzone, startling several of the tribe with his appearance.

He greets them with smug I-knew-I-could-find-you and a delighted-to-find-you also a somewhat ominous I-have-news-from-the-home.

The three princesses grab him and pepper him with questions. He tells them what he knows, and what he knows isn't good.

The part the tentacle princesses already know, but which is new to Kamryn is this:

Once there was a Lover who was beloved by all the Tentacled she met. She could speak their psychic language from day one, and was already an incredible fleshcrafter, and who knows what other powers she might have had. There is a stretch of time of which is a mystery to most, but the next known fact is that this Lover began collecting others of her own kind. This went unremarked and uncontested, for what business was it of anyone else's how she had her fun?

By the time it became clear to the princesses and queens what was going on, she had an army. She called herself the Red Queen, and she began a conquest that swept through the Red.

With all the powers of a proper Tentacle Queen magnified and empowered to insane heights by her ability to drain mana from the Red itself, this Red Queen spread like a cancer, devouring minds and enslaving bodies. She met little resistance, at first, for even in her extremity she seemed to only be overzealous-but-aligned with the ways of the Tentacled, filling the pits and tunnels of the Red with sweeping orgies and novel mutations that drew in interested crowds.

But where the Red Queen's influence takes hold, there is only one voice. One voice alone, where there should be thousands upon thousands. One voice alone, with all others subsumed to it, Tentacled and humanoid alike.

It was impossible for that to go unnoticed.

Various factions started to build psychic defenses and stage incursions into the Red Queen. To fight to slow her spread. To recover their lost kin. To contain the Red Queen and foil her conquest. But, the Red Queen did not make it easy.

The part that is new to even the tentacle princesses is this:

A great psychic barrier was erected across the Pink, not too far from the middle of the continent, but everything north of that barrier is lost. What's worse, the Red Queen has learned from her mistake, and has created a 'skin' of additional voices around her territory, masking the true nature of what she is from anyone who doesn't already know. She uses carefully bred living clothing to keep her decoy humanoids docile and controllable without taking their minds away from them entirely, while holding some unknown threat or power over the few Tentacled she's allowed to have their own thoughts.

For now, the barrier is holding, and a loose coalition of tentacle princesses have settled most of the displaced Tentacled and their Lovers in the south. But no one believes the barrier is a permanent solution, and they have no means to take the north back from the Red Queen.

And the Red Queen isn't idle. No one on their side can get close enough to find out what the Red Queen is building, but she's clearly building something. There is a Spire of flesh in the north, rising higher every day, and scouts recount tones of both joy and terror. It beats, they say. It beats like a heart.

That is the situation as it is known to Lygos.

Kamryn is still thirsty for stories of the outside world, and this one is kind of a big deal.

She bumps into Lygos, and he reflexively opens up, hot, slimy, purple tentacles flooding over her body. She's yanked off of the few other tentacles idly paying attention to her and sucked inside the armor in one smooth motion, the tentacles inside instantly spearing into and ravaging her holes with wild abandon, hurtling her into a chain of explosive orgasms.

     A tension seeps out of Lygos, like a man given water and shade after hours of parched work, as Kamryn's orgasmic ecstasy floods into his mind and being and bolsters him.

Kamryn quickly recovers the ability to think, between orgasms...

...well, sure, fine, being fucked like this is new, as all-encompassing as a very small tentacle pit but distinctly a different experience. And now she's closer to the conversation, and can still hear everything they're saying. Though it's hard to follow with how the princesses have lapsed out of lexical speech a bit as they confer.

The breakdown is this:

There is only one explanation the three princesses can think of, for what the Red Queen has accomplished. They demand that Lygos draw a map, showing them exactly where the Spire is. He tells them the coalition already thought of that, and yes. The new Spire is being grown directly over the Wound of the Lost Heart.

Legend tells that, long ago, a great and powerful heart was somehow cut from the Red itself and stolen away to the other end of the continent. No one knows what became of it, beyond the distant stories of a Consumed land.

"But if the Red Queen has conceived her power by insinuating herself into the Wound..."

It's an insane idea, but it occurs to all of them pretty much at the same time. The Lonely Heart. If it could somehow be retrieved, then maybe there was a way to use it to heal the Wound and expunge the Red Queen from the Red entirely!

An ancient legend, their only hope of overthrowing a tyrant and freeing their home? To pursue such a quest would be folly. And yet... what other hope do they have?

Of particular interest is this: The base of the princess coalition is far off in the southern reaches of the Pink. They, however, are smack in the middle of the northern Grey, almost five hundred miles away, five hundred miles closer to the Consumed. They, are not far off the middle of the continent, on an east-west line. If someone is going to journey to the Lonely Heart? It pretty much has to be them.

It took Lygos years to skirt the edges of the Red through the edges of Red Queen territory until he found their escape tunnel, and he can project a psychic impression that lets him pass for one of the Red Queen's Living Clothe slaver-mantles, at least if no one gets a look at him with eyes. Moving an entirely exploratory force through that gauntlet to get them into the continent? It would take decades, if they made it at all.

"Our only hope is the Lonely Heart, and the only ones that can be sent to seek that hope are ours," Taud concludes bleakly.

"I will go," Lygos instantly volunteers. "I will fight for our kin."

He goes to salute... and finds he can't? Why won't his arm move. He strains against some internal resistance, and it doesn't give, his arm won't move-

Kamryn hums a cheeky you-forgot-I-was-here-didn't-you and an I-can-do-this-all-day, and then, because this is a serious matter, an I-want-to-go-with-you-you'll-need-me. She's not sure it comes across entirely clear without the psychic component, but her jaw is wedged open by a massive purple tentacle dick that's squirming and thrusting deep into her throat and she can't exactly pronounce words.

She's not strong enough to overpower Lygos either, but what she can do is lock her muscles and refuse to bend, preventing him from moving his limbs. And she can keep doing it, because she doesn't get tired.

"You can talk?!?!?!?"

That isn't what he meant to say. He's met humans who can convey complex concepts before. He was just startled. Startled. Yes. Usually humans who are docile enough to grab and swallow without even paying attention to who or what he's swallowing aren't very communicative! It's totally reasonable to be startled!

After several long moments of struggle both against Kamryn's rigid body and his own embarrassment, Lygos spits her out so he can look at her and ask, "What was that about coming with us?"