Celia hit the ground like a sack full of potatoes. Legs completely shutting off on her as a spear of pain pierced it’s way through her neck. All her senses but touch vanishing along with any semblance of balance she had a moment prior. Which was uncomfortable and kinda made her feel a little too much like a… well a corpse. A, too young to die in some sort of hellish dimension filled with monsters and nonsense, corpse.
It was, unsurprisingly, not a very good feeling. And per her current streak of luck, it only got worse from there. As she could feel what she thought to be an insect slowly crawling up her neck. A whole minute passed before it finally made its way all the way around to her face. Which gave her the chance to get a proper look at it for the first time.
And what she saw looked an awful lot like a dark brown centipede, but not. This thing had a long barbed stinger at the back, red with what she assumed to be her blood. As she stared at that stinger however, it began to shift. It’s brutal, thorn like form folding in on itself, slimming down till it became as thin as a needle.
Then it started to come closer and closer. Past her chin, over her lips, and disquietingly close to her left eye. For a moment it hovered there. No movement but the centipede shuffling in place. It’s huge black orbs for eyes seemingly studying her, weighing something about her out. Deciding.
Plunge. The needle descended. It’s tip frighteningly close and terrifyingly fast. Sharpest point breaking through something and rendering Celia half blind. At the same moment, however, she found herself capable of movement once again. Free to writhe in pain as the centipede stabbed into her.
But instead of submitting to it, Celia realized something about herself that she hadn’t really known before.
She didn’t want to die. There was a refusal of it inside of her. A desperate longing to fight back, to bite and tear, to do anything to survive. And it was instinctive. Like a wolf backed into a corner, she growled and bit. Teeth clamping down on the centipede’s tail, grip like a vice as she twisted her head in an attempt to tear it off.
She was half successful. Eliciting a sound like dying thunder to erupt from the bug. Sending it into a fit of thrashing carapace and legs. But it did not relent even as it thrashed with well deserved pain.
No there was something about this that it was committed to. Something that it needed to do. Much like she wanted, no she needed to survive. And somewhere in between their wills met, and the world was plunged into black.
Celia fell into her own self and the centipede fell with her. Thoughts boiling against each other in a tug of war match she wasn’t prepared for. And so the centipede started to gain ground. Thoughts like stains and infection spreading through her, connecting her to it. Revealing its thoughts and desires to her.
"Become host. Will. Become strong and big. Will. Must be. Must be. Will."
Celia felt her sense of self vanish for a moment. Only to come back with a vengeance, and realization of what it was she was up against.
A parasite that wanted to steal what she was and wear her. A thing worse than death, that would keep her alive in itself but only to serve as a puppet vessel. She was to be hollowed out and made a temple unto it. Dead, dead, more than dead.
It was disgusting on so many levels. Fueling a rage inside of her that lashed out like the undying fury of a storm. Her thoughts thunder and lightning both, her sense of self a sword that she wielded to strike at this invader. To push it back up where it came from and out of her. And she was doing so. This thing was hollow, devoid of a true sense of self, nothing but hunger and greed driving it. But, in spite of that, it had already sunk a root in her. Tethered some part of itself to her, so that when she had fended it off it just came right back. Too close to death already to properly die.
She killed it five times before she realized it for the roach that it was. It simply wasn’t going to go away. No, there was something about it that was permanent, and that part wanted her. Was going to get her, one way or another. For it was hunger unceasing, untiring, and devoted to itself wholeheartedly.
It wasn’t long till Celia felt fatigue begin to settle in. The dangerous most insidious kind, that warred not just against her energy to continue doing but against her very will to continue being. Whispering in her ear the most dangerous kind of thought.
Give up.
Considering what was at stake, it made for a very weak temptation. The first time it came around at least. The second time was similar. By the tenth, Celia was growing daring enough to play with idea.
By the twelfth, she knew something had to be done. Anything to save her from death.
So, she did something incredibly stupid.
She swallowed.
Taking in the centipede in a broken state. Slowly, carefully, chewing it’s being into her being and just hoping that it wouldn’t kill her. A gamble, a particularly dumb one, but it was better than certain death. At least, that was what she convinced herself of.
And somehow it worked. Celia felt it still, silence filling the space of her mind for the first time in what felt like hours. She even felt the world begin to come back to her. Sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. She could breathe, chest rising up and down as foul air filled her lungs. But Celia could care less about the quality, or how it burned her throat, because she was ali-
Something within her bursted apart and began to change as words began to fill her head. They were simple. But they were change, an edict that wrote itself into her very being, and enacted its new law in flashes of pain.
Celia almost felt herself come undone. She almost felt what she was in her entirety twist into something else. But before that, before an all consuming pit of Other could consume her, she felt something sink into place, and suddenly she was the half director of her own evolution.
I'm always a sucker for eldritch, throw in some evolution and weirdness and I'm all in.