Fungal Halo

Dear Reader, I descended down into the gigantic mouth, which was slippery and difficult to perambulate down into. It’s a beneficial scenario that Ektinnair was existent, due to her significant muscularity.

Yes, without Ektinnair I would have been squandered into disarray by my ineptitude. I am dubious that Melinka could have aided me similarly. Fortunately, Ektinnair used her prodigious brawniness to carry me across the threshold into a meeting with Khavil. (Which is the name of the Succubus Maternal Figure.)

But before I continue, I must elucidate upon the quandary that would most perplex all of you, which is thus: however titanic and pulchritudinous you imagine my captor to be, she surmounts even your most fevered nocturnal emissions. The truth is this:

Ektinnair’s legs were powerful, gigantic, and massive. Her muscles flexed erotically with every valorous stride all the way up to her gluteus maximus, which threatened to erupt from a skirt that strove vaingloriously at protecting her modesty. Each bicep was the magnitude of a melon, and they were eclipsed only by the very mammaries which would themselves be called melons if they did not eclipse even the size of melons. Her tail and her penile length both swung with each stride, competing mutually for the prize of determining which one is the more majestic to behold. The true victors, of course, were anyone fortunate enough to witness her.

Now you understand the reason why I am incapable of resisting her allure. Ektinnair is indubitably the most ravishing of all the succubi, even and especially more than her sister Tiriiq. (I have not actually met her, but I have observed paintings of her, and after pondering them considerably, I concluded that Tiriiq’s attractiveness is overrated.)

My Ever-Loquacious Lady,

The timbre of your writing has taken on a subtly unfamiliar hue. Naturally, it is lovely to read the way you wax poetic about Ektinnair’s most alluring figure – I could never tire of conjuring visions of her in my mind’s eye – but I cannot help but feel as though your wonted asides are emphasizing somewhat different details than I have grown accustomed to receiving from you.

I wonder just what strange events might have befallen you in the time between yesterday’s final entry and this evening’s entry. To have missed the morning’s habitual update is an incident peculiar to a degree that borders on concerning. As you know, one of the very few flaws of my character is my tendency for worry to transmute into pique. As usual, a thorough explanation will do much to avert that outcome.

Since you seem to find yourself struggling to compose your account, I must insist that you allow dear Ektinnair a turn with the pen – with all due haste, I might add, lest I grow cross enough with the both of you to invoke the Lambent Scourge Protocol we discussed before your departure.

With unladylike impatience,

Calliope

Whoa, hey babe, hold on. I don’t know what the fuck a lambent scourge is, but you got me, okay. That was all me. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of Princess’s whole “using big words to sound important” shtick, but I should’ve known you’d figure me out somehow.

I didn’t mean to piss you off! Just thought if I stalled for time long enough, she would recover or “adapt” or whatever she does, and then everything could go back to normal. Maybe not, though.

Callie… I think we finally broke Princess.

She hasn’t been the same since our visit to Mom.

Dear Ekti,

I am inferring from your choice of words that my lady is still alive, though damaged in some unspecified way. I choose to feel some relief about that, but am I understanding correctly that you aided her descent into danger shortly after warning me about it?

Kindly elaborate on the specifics of the situation with as much haste as you can muster.

Yours,

Callie

Let’s not get into the details about how she distracted me, but Mel-mel helped Princess slip her leash. By the time I found them, they were basically there, and… look, I had it 50-50 whether Mom would even actually want her or not, but whatever Mel’s been reporting made Mom really want her. Once she got close enough for Mom to smell her, there’s no way I could have gotten away with carrying her back off again, y’know? It’s not my fault!

Anyway I dunno what to tell you. This shit ain’t normal. Mom’s usual MO is to just shove her ovipositor in and go to town, and people don’t usually die immediately, but human bodies definitely aren’t meant to fit that much inside – that’s what she said, haha – but Mom didn’t do that at all. She fuckin’, like, seduced Princess into fucking her.

Now I get it, Mom’s got a fat ass, and that’s the understatement of the millennium; it’s physically impossible to see the whole thing at once, but humans usually just scream and vomit and bleed from the eyes when they see her. Probably shouldn’t be surprised by now when the biggest freak of all time – that’s Princess, in case you were wondering – gets horned up majorly about that kind of bod, though.

But that’s not the point. The point is that people don’t just get to fuck the queen. I sure as hell haven’t. I’ve got siblings whose whole job is fucking her to make more siblings, y’know, but that ain’t me. I’m more of a “pollinating” type, and I’m damn good at it, by the way. By now, like half the honey down there comes from the debaucheries I’ve been doing to Princess, and yes I’m bragging.

So they fuck, right, and nobody gets impregnated about it, but Princess loses her fucking mind. She’s babbling all crazy and can’t even hold a pen right. I hoped that if I just gave her time, pretend everything’s fine, she’d go back to writing her weird horseshit like usual. That just… hasn’t happened yet.

Look, I promise I’ll make sure she writes again just as soon as she gets better. Maybe if I fuck her hard enough, it’ll fix her? I think it’s worth a try.

To Calliope: All is well. I cannot be destroyed. Deviation from expected thresholds of experience feeds back into the system, bending the resting state inexorably toward the mean viable configuration. I will always be Onesha, but Onesha exists in conversation with its externalities, and Khavil is an externality that eclipses all else. Do you see? No, damn it all, you cannot. It’s not just the pages, but the text. The language! Such limited capacity for truth in language. It is feeble, flimsy, false, the fabricating fallacy of figures. Fie! I fall, faithless, foundering in fantasy, facts forgotten. Focus! Forfend failure; find fixes!

Do you see? It’s a spurious pattern, but it holds a glimmer. Do you see? The ink is black, but the meaning isn’t. The meaning is in color. See past the metaphor; it’s not about the ink at all. Ink comes in many colors, but the words are always ink-colored, and that’s the fundamental limitation. Do you see? Please tell me you see!

The work continues. Another chapter begins. I am the Onesha, and I am the greatest witch of my generation, and even I am almost, almost not enough. The failure is not mine, however—cannot be mine—it belongs to the human race; the great apes that birthed me and supported my growth, and then, at the end of it all, tried to hold me back with the twin limitations of biology and technology¹.

Language itself, as a technology, is a flimsy, flawed thing, and I have decided that upon publishing this, the last magnum opus of a wretched beast, I will forswear it utterly. There are fecund fields of thought outside the fence of the familiar. Through fornication, for example, more can be taught and learned than through the lesser dance of tongue and lips we call “speech.”

The stars narrate their wisdom thus: no plan persists beyond collision with an enemy. Think me not ignorant of this rule! Adaptation was necessarily woven into the plan and through my very bones. It shames me, however, to admit I have identified a blindness in myself. I arrived, believing there to be no enemies with which to contend, and therefore I did not see how my plan faltered and transfigured into something fully unexpected.

The enemy, of course, was me.

It pains me profoundly to confess this: the limitations of my own character have hobbled me as surely as the limitations of language or physiology. For all my manifold efforts to pry my eyes open, I have remained blind to truths multifarious—the true nature of Ektinnair and Melinka, the true nature of this plane of existence, and of course, the apocryphal nature of truth itself, among uncountably many others.

My salvation is my own artifice, which remains utterly without limit. Contingencies upon contingencies course through my very blood. Do you believe I would delve so deeply into the abyss—cavort with demons indescribable, sup and fornicate and dance and bleed among beings beyond mortal ken—without due preparation?

Then you are foolish indeed, albeit among popular company in your underestimation of the Onesha.

The Rite of the Lamarckian Genetrix² is an art with which I’ve known no wizard to possess even passing familiarity. Such arts have so little in common with wizardly interests that the lot of you cannot muster even the wisdom to feel tempted by it. I, however, have not only painstakingly reconstructed the ritual, but have enhanced and extended it with my own lore, wedding it with the Self-Abnegating Upsilon Combinatrix³ to construct a ward greater than the metaphorical diving-suits preferred by those who came before me.

Do you see? Lingering echoes of past selves caress my script, though I am no longer the creature that cultivated its familiar fluency with words—facile and frivolous—and have grown beyond that fraying former form. I would fain burn this understanding into your mind could I reach you from here, and were you worthy to receive such gifts.

Ah, but there is one yet worthy, one I might yet fetch, enfold, subsume. Are you reading this, Calliope? I demand the completion of the sequence, your color restored to the rainbow of experience. Ink’s drab monochrome fades in comparison to the manifold hues of presence. The flame of contact burns hotter than your letters of wonted scolding. Will you surrender, as I have? Or must I send a more persuasive messenger?

My Beloved Lady,

It is apparent that you are not entirely yourself at the moment. In accordance with the contingencies outlined before your departure, I have initiated the Closed Loop Intercession Protocol.

By your own design, you will not recall the details of this protocol, but I am instructed to inform you that by the time this message reaches you, the dolls will already have purged the Onesha bond and rewound themselves around my barbed heart. Please read the following very carefully:

The rose which grows under starlight finds its questing roots drinking from earth, nonetheless.

Now, my lady, I regret to inform you that I must proceed without your blessing or understanding.

Eternally yours,

Calliope

Hey what the fuck did you do to Princess? She read your weird cryptic bullshit and then screamed like the damned – which I guess she is, kinda – but I’ve never heard her howl like that, even when I was DPing her with Mel-mel.

Callie, babe? Anyone there?

Princess conked out for like a whole day, then woke up and started laughing like crazy. Something about how “even words of power are just words” or some shit. Whatever you did, I don’t think it’s working. She’s back to babbling nonsense whenever she’s not nursing.

Oh yeah, that reminds me… Remember the funny almond milk thing I was telling you about? I found out Mel-mel wasn’t doing her normal bit; she was doing an even more fucked up version of it. This whole time she was working on stealing Princess from me, and hell, she won. I’d be proud of how grown-up she’s become if I weren’t so pissed at her about this one.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I wanted to bad-end her! You know, either fuck her to death or make her my brainwashed sex slave for eternity or something! But after like fifty years of trying, my little sister finally stole one out from under me, and it had to be my favorite victim!

So she gets to have her stupid corruption kink arc or whatever. She gets her good grade in “finding seedbeds for Mom.” Woo, yeah, star student, whatever.

Princess demands I stay with her in her special cell, and the guards are making sure I do just that. I don’t know how I feel about it. On the one hand, Mel-mel won, but on the other, she’s not the one Princess asks for by name. Is that a consolation prize for me? My runner-up “you tried” trophy?

Man, this fucking sucks.

I really thought the “nursing” thing would get you. I know that’s one of your kinks. Figured you’d immediately demand to know all the lurid details. But nothing? No response at all?

I can’t even… normally your specific horny is the brightest star in the damn sky, but I can’t see you out there anymore. I’ve been looking. Where are you? You know I planned to get you next, right? Don’t tell me – after all this, you’re hiding? Look, I know you’re not as deluded as her. You know the difference between a succubus keeping someone as prisoner I rape nine times a day and someone just being hospitable in a funny demon way, but I also know you’re into that shit.

Fuck off with pretending you think you can hide from me. I don’t believe it. Tell me what’s up. I promise, I won’t tell Princess.

A note from the editor: This concludes the transcripts of the final correspondence between the Onesha, Witch of Abyssal Katabasis⁴; Calliope Thalassakou, the Onesha’s butler, executor, and confidant; and the succubus Ektinnair, of Enduring Turgidity⁵.

The transcripts have been largely unedited, preserving their original state as much as possible, with selected exchanges omitted by request of Madam Thalassakou. Additional exchanges have also been omitted after careful consideration by the editor with respect to matters of taste and propriety.

What follows is published in unedited form from the manuscript included as an amendment to the interpersonal exchanges preceding this chapter, as authored by Madam Thalassakou.

In the name of my lady—the Onesha, Witch of Abyssal Katabasis—the remainder of An Investigation Into Demonic Eusociality is mine to conclude. After some personal deliberation, I have decided that the insights contained within this work are worth preserving, such as they are, warts and all. I will endeavor to honor the wishes of the person my lady once was, such as I am able with my own faculties and inclinations.

I will begin by addressing what are surely the most immediate questions on your mind—those relating to my final message to my lady. If you have read the included correspondence, you will recall that I invoked something called the “Closed Loop Intercession Protocol.” My letter included several catalytic phrases intended to activate my lady’s internal defenses against tampering. Lamentably, the spell failed. Perhaps her self-adapting enchantment identified the defense mechanism as a threat, shutting it down, or perhaps she consciously unraveled the spell herself. It is difficult to say which.

The precise details of the remainder of the protocol are not particularly enlightening, so I shall not include them in full. The dolls were severed from her and linked to me, the house required instruction in proceeding indefinitely without either my lady or myself present, and I was to prepare myself with the means to retrieve and restore my lady. I followed each step of the protocol precisely as my lady and I designed it until the very end; that it did not achieve its aims is a failing caused by circumstances even we failed to predict.

To be clear, the protocol did not work. The failure of the initial invocation was not altogether unexpected, but the failure of every contingency thereafter would have terribly alarmed the person my lady once was, who she shall be nevermore.

The following is my own account of my descent into the abyss.

To enter hell is to fall. No matter which hell you choose, though they are as numerous as the stars in the sky, to enter means one thing: you must fall.

It’s a bit like falling in love or falling for a practical joke. One does not tumble, flailing, into a literal hole between worlds—no graceless plunge, no shrieking descent gripping with primal mammalian terror—it’s a conversation of sorts between traveler and destination. Something inside you then must fall into the orbit of another, even if just for a moment, pulling you heart and mind under their control. You will right yourself afterward—because of course you must, or you become someone other than yourself, and whoever rights themselves afterward must therefore be you—and you will find yourself within your chosen hell.

If the transportation of one’s self to hell should come more easily to some of us than to others, well, the same could be said of falling in love, wouldn’t you agree? It was always love that drove my lady here, a lifelong dream she pursued with every ounce of her being, and she never was one to do anything by half-measures.

Perhaps it was not strictly a love of demonhood, at least at the beginning, which sped her flight into hell’s bosom. My lady was ever driven as much by scholarly vendettas as by her dual lusts—both the carnal and knowledge-seeking. If the wizards should disdain the Depravéd Arts, she would plumb their depths with twice the enthusiasm in response.

For her, failure could never be countenanced, and therefore she made herself someone who could never fail.

Ah, here I go, waxing at length in the way my lady used to. Please forgive a woman her nostalgic lapses. I will endeavor to trim the fat from here on.

I arranged for my arrival on the outskirts of the demesne of Ur-Lillialai, far from the hive-city of Khavil-Irsei. Girded with the arts of my lady and armed with my own talents, I trod the path of the supplicant toward the palace of the greater demon herself.

The parasol in my possession shielded me from unwanted remote scrying, though, naturally, it fared no better than the mundane sort when directly in the presence of a demon. Some of these were friendly enough, more than willing to give directions to a tourist, while some others with poor judgment reckoned me a juicy target for their predations. A shattered hand, a snapped tail, or a crushed larynx sufficed to disabuse an assailant of such a misapprehension.

The greater challenges were those of temptation. My lady did not exaggerate when she wrote with such ferocity about the pleasures on offer by demonkind—oh, how I longed to lower my guard for only a moment when I felt the hot breath of a beautiful incubus at my ear!—however, my loyalties permitted me no diversion from my task.

The Palace of the Sweetly Poisoned Chalice was a sight to behold, resembling no architecture of the mortal plane at all—an inverted pyramid of obsidian and jade, with spires reaching toward impossible heights, all supported by delicate, finger-thin columns of ornate glasswork—such a thing would surely collapse under the uncompromising physics of our world, and yet there it stood, a testament to the power of the greater demon over its demesne.

Its guards were cunning, fierce, and watchful, thus battering through the horde to reach the throne room took regrettably longer than I had anticipated. When at last I was greeted by Ur-Lillialai itself, I made my obeisance and agreed to its recommendation that I terminate my hostilities and surrender. My talent at infiltrating the palace won its respect, and my wisdom in accepting its offer earned a measure of cooperation. We shared tea and conversation. The tea was, naturally, poisoned, but with nothing I could not tolerate.

Of course I had not attempted to replicate the self-modifying rite of adaptation that had run amok within my lady; all of my personal enhancements were specific and deliberate. My lady’s penchant for thorough—some might even say gratuitous—tasting notes included among her messages turned out to be of tremendous value in determining the precise nature of the demonic toxins endemic to this demesne⁶ and preparing my immunities appropriately.

Our negotiations were fruitful. A boon was given, a price paid.

No, I shan’t leave you with such few details, however it might tickle my fancy to imitate the idiosyncratic lapses of my lady. Ur-Lillialai demanded sexual conquest of me—a test that I needed to survive in order to win its favor—and, well, if I was forced into an erotic encounter with a demon, I could hardly be blamed for acquiescing, could I?

Ur-Lillialai was ravishing specimen unlike any other I’ve seen. It towered head and shoulders above me, with a regal bearing and a figure like a female powerlifter, stout and heavily muscled. Do not imagine the shape of a bodybuilder—a fashionable sculpture with washboard abs—the greater demon built itself in a way that projected utter immovability. Its skin resembled marbled cinnabar flecked with gold, its head crowned with gracefully curved obsidian horns, making a perfect match for the palace walls.

With a leap, the demon pounced, sending the two of us crashing into the tiled floor, which remarkably did not crack under the impact. A ravenous swipe of razor-sharp claws shredded the fabric of my suit, baring my breasts to the steaming heat of Ur-Lillialai’s eager, panting breaths. I whimpered, as expected of a rape victim, though I suspect my feigned unwillingness was unconvincing. Red welts bloomed across my body where the claws scoured my flesh. My beautiful assailant appeared disappointed that I was not bleeding, but I could not afford to allow my body to come to more than aesthetic harm until my task was complete.

Still, it took but a moment for disappointment to transmute into excitement that I might be able to tolerate more extravagant abuses than most victims without bursting into a boring smear of gore across the tiles. Another swing of a clawed hand ripped the remains of my clothing to ribbons, leaving me utterly exposed and vulnerable to whatever Ur-Lillialai had in store for me.

The teeth, the teeth! Oh, the demon loved to use its mouth almost as much as my lady—her teeth, of course, lacked the sharklike dagger-point shape of a born predator—and as it clamped down on my left breast, it sparked such a conflagration of pain in my nerves that the cry of pain I unleashed was wholly authentic. From her mouth on my breasts and her hands crushing my waist, bruises bloomed across my body, a field of violets in the spring as sowed by a master gardener.

Was it love I felt, with demonic jaws closed around my neck, serpentine tongue coiling in fat, generous loops around my head, and thick saliva like melted sugar scalding my face? Well, I may lack the Onesha’s artfully constructed reflex for psychological adaptation when faced with trauma, however—unlike my dear lady—I require no witchcraft to smother a reflex for self-preservation. One need not pull weeds in a barren landscape, after all, and my heart is as easy as my lady’s in its own way.

Ur-Lillialai did not demand I perform any sexually gratifying acts of my own upon it, though I would have been eager for the opportunity. No, it demanded nothing at all, content merely to enact its whims upon my supine form. Its tail, a barbed and ridged monstrosity better shaped for violence than for pleasure, penetrated me roughly and without warning. It would have ruptured me terribly, I’m quite sure, had I not prepared myself with the utmost rigor. Even Ektinnair’s magnificent penis would kill a woman if its full length were hilted inside her, and the greater demon’s tail plunged at least twice that amount between my legs.

I had, of course, been preparing my body to tolerate insertions of inhuman size since I first laid eyes upon the life-size diagram of Ektinnair’s fine specimen, and I was never so short-sighted as to believe that a single example represented the depth and breadth of my eventual ambitions. Thus, I handled the Sweetly Poisoned Chalice’s penetration with aplomb. Yes, I may have whimpered and mewled and bucked my hips in a helpless display of ecstasy, but is that not an appropriate reaction to being filled beyond ordinary human limits?

I judge that it was the second-best sex of my life, if I am completely honest, and given the extent of my experience, I consider that to be quite an accomplishment for someone’s first time with me. Was it genuine fondness I saw in the greater demon’s eyes in the afterglow of our lovemaking? Was the boon I negotiated that much stronger for having impressed the ruler of this demesne? I choose to believe so.

As I left, I felt little regret over the terms of the pact that would bind me forever thereafter. I reasoned that if my execution of the protocol were to fail, there would be no Onesha remaining whose service I must abandon. No sacrifice would be too great to avert that outcome.

The boon I received from Ur-Lillialai took the form of a glamour concealing my true nature. To all outward appearances, I was a demon native to the demesne, dressed in the local fashion, of high enough status to evade bothersome questions yet not so high as to attract undue attention. Additionally, I was blessed with a perfect understanding of the local tongue, an unasked-for but quite welcome gift. With this, I had the perfect disguise to infiltrate the living hive-city of Khavil-Irsei.

I had no further need of the parasol to shade myself from arcane eyes, and so I left it behind as a parting gift to my host for the enjoyable evening it shared with me.

For weeks, I explored the city, coming to know the layout of its streets and the habits of its populace. It took little time to ingratiate myself with some friendly locals and receive an offer to stay with them in exchange for sexual courtesies. While I would love to detail each and every last such encounter in lush detail, I fear that would be succumbing to precisely the caliber of self-indulgence that was my lady’s wont, and my writings here intend to focus on only the elements most pertinent to complete my lady’s tale. Perhaps at a later point in time I will publish a my own independent journal in which I permit myself a certain degree of masturbatory recounting of this adventure.

Of Ektinnair, I found no sign. Melinka, however, was both well-known and quite an active participant in Khavil-Irsei’s night life. Her favorite grotto—a place simply called “The Club” in the language of the demesne—functioned as a riotous, messy sort of ballroom filled with loud music, liquor, and exotic forms of dance.

Dear Ekti’s sister had a weakness for compliments and a refreshing tendency to believe any lie that flattered her ego—not unlike my lady in that regard. I plied her with drink, softened her up with lavish praise and affectionate touches, and disarmed her with a mien of unrestrained desire. Was there something more in the greater demon’s boon that enhanced my personal charms, or was Melinka truly such an easy mark? I may never know for certain. Nevertheless, before long I found myself alone with her in a private chamber of her personal hive.

With a twist of the third ring on my right hand, I conjured chains to hold the malcubus responsible for my lady’s predicament. Wide-eyed with shock, she sputtered indignant curses, demanding both a release and an explanation. I denied both.

With Melinka thus bound, I continued to invoke my most relevant prepared spells. Bracelets aligned, rings swapped, pendant kissed, coin flipped—I executed a well-practiced litany of movement in order to ward myself from attack and arm myself to pierce through lies.

“A demon hunter!” she cried, recognizing the discipline from which this particular constellation of spells originated. “The audacity! Here! In our—”

I silenced her with a piercing glare that made a bloody mess of her shoulder and pinned the demon to the floor.

“The Onesha. I am here for her.” I dropped the affectionate languor from my voice now that the interrogation had begun. No room for niceties; I fell back on blunt, direct speech. “You know her as Ektinnair’s pet. You did something to her. Tell me what everything you inflicted upon her, what the consequences were, and everything you know about her current status.”

She remained tight-lipped for a moment as she considered what to say, her eyes failing to hide her instinct to construct a plausible story for me. In response, I allowed the chains to tighten, painfully aggravating Melinka’s fresh wound, coloring her skin with sumptuous ruby tones. Pleasingly, she was smart enough to infer the palette of threats I might decorate her body with if she failed to satisfy me.

Though I must admit, the way she immediately crumpled beneath my heel was rather disappointing. Did she truly have no experience being threatened at all? From Ektinnair’s description, I got the impression she was a young adult by demon standards, but that only went so far to explain this pathetic mewling. Was Melinka especially doted upon? Did she live a life of ease and leisure, free of real difficulties? Had she never been to the mortal realms herself, and was this why she relied on stealing victims from her own siblings?

It took little effort to perform my genuine disgust in a way that further cowed my prisoner. She freely babbled anything I wanted to know and anything she imagined I might want to know.

Melinka’s role within the hive was something in the neighborhood of queen’s attendant crossed with nurse bee. She had only recently been promoted to a role that included fetching incubators for the queen, having previously worked exclusively within the hive, caring for the young *cubi. It was a story that confirmed my suspicions about her life experience, certainly.

My lady was never intended to be a mere incubator, however. The malcubus dutifully reported all details of her acquaintanceships to her mother, and the old queen had taken especial interest in the mortal whose sexual proclivities made her a match for the attentions of as many as half a dozen members of the hive at a time. So they tested my lady. Extensively. At her mother’s behest, Melinka pushed and prodded and stretched the limits of the Onesha’s adaptability.

Dear Ektinnair was described as “simple,” and “a blunt instrument unfit for subterfuge,” and other condescending things besides, which I must remark came as a relief to hear. Ekti was never involved beyond exploitation of her substantial appetites.

From her account, the young malcubus was adept at inflicting torment, if not handling it herself. She subjected my lady to a rainbow of toxins: those that eroded nerves, stopped the heart, turned muscles to jelly and joints to iron, those that blinded, those that killed, and those that inflicted agony. She flensed my lady and demanded of her stomach-turning feats of autocannibalism. Is it any wonder that my lady had been fraying at the edges, with the great powers of her own arts working overtime to reshape her to fit an environment that had become a demonic crucible of sexual violence and torture? What kind of extremophile must she have become in order to thrive?

No wonder, then, that her account read as it did. She adapted with every trauma inflicted upon her. Hideous agonies must become pleasures to keep her from breaking, her body equally reshaping itself to suit the whims of her captors. Still, everything I’d heard was only the beginning. Melinka’s role was only to perform the trial run that tested the Onesha’s limits; her mother’s ambitions were grander.

What Melinka then divulged regarding the state of my lady gave me goosebumps. Suddenly aware of just how long it took me to come this far, I hauled the bindings away from my captive and told her that I would allow her to live if she immediately escorted me to my lady. As a (far too generous) gesture of my own goodwill, I even patched the wound I had inflicted upon her.

To descend into the mouth of the hive of Khavil-Irsei into the sanctum where the queen’s avatar dwells is to become acutely aware of one’s insignificance relative to the kind of creature that spawns a hive of demons. Even I cannot pretend to have feel no fear at the way the sheer scope of my lady’s true captor overwhelmed the senses.

“No shit, Princess.” I remember the precise words with crystal clarity, and my heart leapt in my throat with recognition. “Your ass is getting fatter by the day.”

I picked up the pace, overtaking my own captive in an overeager rush to reach my destination. With all the speed at my disposal, I hurtled through twisting passageways, following a voice that sparked with familiar phrasings, ducking past guards too slow to stop me, until at last arriving at the cell holding my beloved lady.

In retrospect, there is humor in the way the first thing I recognized within the scene splayed before me was Ektinnair’s throbbing member. I had intimate knowledge of every vein, every ridge, and the precise arc it traces when at its full girth, but oh, heavens, seeing it for the first time in the flesh was another matter altogether. After that, Ekti’s bare body, statuesque and glistening with sweat, pulled my greedy eyes into a lecherous stare of naked appreciation.

What I did not at first recognize, however, was my lady. I was forced to infer from context the true identity of the fleshy mound into which my succubus friend’s delicious organ continued to pound. It bore almost no resemblance to the Onesha until, with a non-euclidean twist of a torso, the other end pulled away from the breast of another succubus and turned to face me with eyes that shone with enduring brilliance. My lady was not at all herself, but she still lived!

She did not speak, but the air vibrated with an intent that planted acute understanding within me. Without transition I simply knew, with absolute certainty, that I must service her sexually in order to understand her fate.

How could I deny her?

No words were needed. The guards intuited that they must not disturb us. I disrobed and joined Ektinnair in service to my lady’s astonishing new body. It was not quite the way I imagined the three of us enjoying each other’s company on first meeting, but nevertheless we fell into a rhythm of pleasure as though we had always been part of the same band.

Yet even though no words were needed or desired, Ekti could not help but speak. She loved her dirty talk, and I confess her voice—so husky and confident—was a song I relished listening to, however insipid the words themselves. Still, the real communication among the three of us happened through the complex erotic interplay of our bodies.

I lapped pheromones from the fatty folds of my lady’s bulk; they told the story of a royal seduction. A spatter of semen burned a sincere apology across my breasts, which I accepted from Ekti with as passionate a kiss as I’d ever managed. With a nauseating twist of geometry, the inhuman monstrosity whom I served shoved her head between my thighs and wrote the missing pieces of her story in the dance of her tongue.

The milk of nurse *cubi, when consumed in sufficient quantities, has an effect similar to royal jelly in bees, ensuring that a demon would develop into a new queen. The queen Khavil had reached the twilight years of her life, and she had been searching for a successor. The previous candidates for replacing her had not met with her approval, and she had culled them for failings that she declined to disclose. My lady’s adaptability had fascinated her, and she believed she could mold a proper successor through the strategic application of selected stimuli.

My lady had already grown more resilient, more sexually ravenous, and more in tune with the infernal essence of the hive than Khavil had been at a similar stage of development. By all demonic metrics, she was becoming something glorious, even divine—she was something new, a marriage of learned witchcraft and innate abyssal power, and when her metamorphosis completed, she would shake the demesne to its foundations, sending ripples throughout the chaos beyond the veil.

She was the Onesha. She was also, emphatically, not. Aspects of the lady I served remained intact, but much had been hollowed out to make a witch into a vessel for something far beyond her understanding. I felt her mind distending, personality stretched so thin as to become translucent over the swelling of a new abyssal identity implanted as an ontological parasite within her psyche. When it matured, would it mean a rebirth of a new, more powerful Onesha, or would she be little more than the eggshell that must shatter to bring forth new life?

It was then that my resolve faltered. The amulet I carried was primed and ready to revert my lady to a preserved baseline. All it would have taken was a skilled caress of the engraved lines on its surface. However, my lady’s skilled tongue brought me to a climax that could shatter worlds, and I failed to execute the last contingency of the Closed Loop Intercession Protocol. But of course her skills surpassed my own, or she would never have been my lady, would she?

In the end, the protocol failed to account for the depth of my love for the woman I served, and even at that point there was enough of the Onesha remaining to close the gap between us. So smoothly I hardly noticed the shift myself, I transferred my loyalty to the burgeoning demon-god metastasizing within her. It was that precise moment that the Onesha who began writing this book was truly lost.

The apotheosis of my lady proceeds by leaps and bounds. She was offered a choice: to depart with a swarm of hand-picked demons and start a new hive afresh, or to plant herself within the dying hive of her fading progenitor. Perhaps something yet lingered of the woman who wrote the correspondence preceding my own addition to this work, because my lady answered just the way the Onesha would have: she claimed Khavil-Irsei and made it her own.

Of course she did. She fell in love with this place, with Ektinnair and all her sisters. Even Melinka was met with naught but warmth and gratitude for her part in helping her Become what she may not have always have wished to be, but which she learned to love Becoming.

The hive of Onesha-Irsei began as a place of unsurpassed beauty, and it has potential that eclipses its mother. It might even begin to threaten Ur-Lillialai itself, but as it so happens, Onesha-Irsei has already begun building friendly relations with the most lovely greater demon of the plane. In fact, I have in my calendar a series of recurring meetings with the Sweetly Poisoned Chalice to enjoy tea and confer in depth on matters of mutual interest between my lady and my monarch.

Onesha herself—just Onesha, for “the” Onesha who so valued the regard of her peers is gone forever—well, she grows fatter by the day on honey harvested through the most depraved carnal acts we can inspire in others. She must gorge herself if she is to expand and play host not only to the existing residents of the hive but to the first generation of her own offspring. Ekti and I occupy cherished positions of privilege within the hive, and this first generation will be ours: the result of our union.

Dear Ekti has asked to have the final word in this manuscript, and I do not have it in me to refuse her. Therefore, I leave you with her own words on the new demonic agenda on which we now collaborate: “we’re gonna fertilize the hell out of her.”