Teresa's struggles against the knife-lined tentacles gripping her limbs grow more frantic. She needs to speak, to beg Eve to listen, but there's no air left in her lungs. The pain won't stop. It won't stop. It has to stop --

Eve closes her eyes and catches her breath. She is faint with euphoria. Teresa's agony seeps in through her tentacles, and she savors it: the subtleties, the taste of it. The pain Teresa feels because of her is not dull like a bruise, nor rough like a scrape. It is piercing and acute and unbearable. It is like ten thousand stinging paper-cuts criss-crossing the canvas of her flesh.

She hopes that Teresa has lucidity enough to appreciate the intricacies of her suffering.

Teresa is not appreciating much of anything.

But she feels it. She can't do anything but feel it. Her cheeks are flushed like Eve's, and her eyes are full of tears, and her muscles are exhausted but still she struggles fruitlessly.

She can't endure any more of this. Not one second. She thought she could take it but she was wrong. How much longer can it possibly go on?

It will go on precisely as long as Eve demands. She will hurt, and heal, and hurt again, and there will be neither mercy nor escape for her helpless victim until for the first time in her life Eve is satisfied.

Oh, she adores this.

More. More. She wraps a tendril tight around Teresa's left breast, and digs her suckers in and pulls, cutting and lacerating the delicate flesh --

"Ah!"

She struggles violently, desperate to get away, pushing back into the hard cobblestones. Her leg jerks --

-- and Eve's tendrils wrap around it. A tight black spiral, embracing her knee and her calf and foot. There are blades, but the suckers do not begin to dig yet.

She can feel it. She can feel the strong tendrils wrapping her foot, the sharp edges not yet cutting the delicate skin of the sole, and somehow it is as acute a feeling as all the knives cutting her. She -- she would have thought that she would be afraid for her face, her armpits, her nipples, her cunt. The weak points.

But the truth is that she is made entirely of weak points. Every inch of her soft and pliant body is a vulnerability. Eve can hurt everything.

How is it that all these thoughts can race through her mind, when surely there should be no space for anything but pain? She should have passed out by now.

And Eve feels a bit of that thought, just faintly, and smiles. "Don't worry," she says, still maintaining that iron grip on Teresa's breast, still digging her blades into her soft skin, still caressing the sole of her foot. "You won't lose consciousness. The secretions will keep you awake. So you can keep hurting for me, no matter what."

Why...

Why does that comfort her?

Because surely it can't get any worse than this. Right? If it's impossible for her to pass out, then she can only feel as much pain as she's able. And if it gets no worse than it is now... Maybe she can stand it, until Eve is finished. For Eve. For Lynia...

She's so pure, and innocent, isn't she? Even when she's gasping desperately, even when there are tears in her eyes, even while her body is being ruined. Not enough. Not yet. She's so beautiful, and Eve needs so desperately to find out just how much she can endure.

She brings the slender ends of a pair of finer tendrils up to wrap around the tips of Teresa's breasts, perversely hard. And squeezes, cutting like wire. And at Teresa's foot she begins to dig and gnaw, prying up her skin.

It's getting worse.

How can it be getting worse? How can it...

Eve had left parts of her alone, before, and she hadn't realized it but that was a sort of refuge. And now those parts are being tortured too. And it hurts, it hurts, it's not enough to think that but it hurts --

She twists, contorting, desperate to ease the pain for even a moment. It does nothing. There is only one thing left to her.

She screams.

It echoes within Eve's sealed wings, the exquisite sound of Teresa's suffering. The tone is so high and pure and sweet that Eve feels almost as if it ought to shatter the jewels that lie upon the stones.

She watches the beautiful shapes that Teresa's mouth makes, open wide, her head shaking, tears flying from her eyes.

It's so good, and she wants more, and --

She squeezes down more viciously on Teresa's breast. No rest, no mercy.

There's a hitch in Teresa's screaming, and then her voice turns to hoarse, agonized cries.

Hmm. She liked the screams better. They were a fuller expression of her cherished victim's lovely voice. She can still feel all of Teresa's pain, of course, and it's still just as intense and wonderful, but...

What if she takes a tentacle and buries it firmly in Teresa's belly-button, and sucks and cuts at the tender skin there with all her might? What then?

She didn't think she had any breath left with which to scream, but she does.

Yes. Yes. That's it. She holds her grip for a long moment, drinking in the sounds. Eve's shuddering, her tentacles shaking, her eyes are half-lidded from the pleasure, and...

It's a little bit embarrassing, actually, to feel this good in front of Teresa. Odd, given everything, but somehow she's still self-conscious about it.

So she stops. Eases her hold on Teresa's sensitive body, withdraws her suckers and her blades. A little break for poor Teresa.

She's lying there underneath Eve, shaking and crying and bleeding. She hasn't really noticed that Eve's stopped torturing her. It still hurts.

Eve caresses her, gently. Strokes the contours of her blood-streaked skin with a hundred tentacles.

A part of her is a little shocked at how guilty she doesn't feel. All those years of holding back, and now that she's torturing a woman who might as well be her sister, she can't muster even a little shame?

Well. That was why she had to hold back. She always knew it would feel too good, too fulfilling, for anything to stop her once she started.

Besides, Teresa agreed to this. It's what they need. It's the only way to save Lynia.

So there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. This lovely, exquisite, beautiful ruin that Eve has turned Teresa into.

"Nobody else has ever seen you like this, have they?" Eve says. With her own mouth, this time. "Because you've never been hurt this way before."

"No," Teresa whispers. There is blood at the corner of her mouth. She doesn't know why. "Never."

Not like this... New, weak tears pool in her eyes.

She doesn't even consider lying, or refusing to answer. Because... Because she's terrified of what this creature will do to her. No, that's not it. It's because...she's laid bare. There aren't any secrets anymore. The sxelanth will take whatever it wants.

"Yes," Eve murmurs, and the sound is both of Eve's voice and the sxelanth's hiss. "Your pain is mine, beloved. Only mine."