The wyrm writhes within your guts, bringing such acute pain that you have to force yourself to bite off the screams your throat involuntarily produces.
You have to remind yourself that you swallowed this thing on purpose—this pain is a necessary step of your symbiotic journey.
It would have been nice to know how it would progress.
Instead, you are forced to assume it is just the next phase of the process when you feel your eyes burn, your tears turn to blood, and you find yourself unable to sleep as red streaks cover your face and stain your pillow.
When you think you are having a heart attack—chest pain, numbness, and vertigo taking hold of you—it is just the wyrm choosing to make a meal of that once-vital organ.
The wyrm asserts itself as your heart’s replacement, as it has the rest of your organs.
You’re getting there.
Your imitation of that former life of yours ends. Humans get perturbed by the crunching of bone accompanying each movement.
Or the way you watch them without even looking their way.
Or your voice.
Your voice.
Your sweet, resonating voice.
A voice like the sun’s raging core.
By the time your glassy skin starts to crack, eggshell fractures slowly spreading across the surface, you have long since stopped thinking of yourself as a separate creature from the wyrm.
What you have become in your glorious union will make the world itself shake in fear.
The human you once identified as was only the most recent thing to swallow you—the first to be consumed and hatched from.
Before that, this planet swallowed you in its gravity well.
Before that, this universe swallowed you.
You will consume and grow and hatch from them too.