Happy Halloween!! I'm so proud to present this spooky story alongside a commission I got from the spectacular Lawaros: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58668956/

Leave a comment on their art to let them know what you think!


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Ever since Astrid was a child, she had always adored Halloween, but it wasn’t for the costumes, or the candy… no, it was for the ghosts and the witching! She adored hearing tales of haunted houses and curses, of being possessed, haunted, and most importantly, transformed. The idea of a spirit transfiguring their victim had always excited her, and she knew that the Halloween witching hours were the strongest of all — her best chance to experience it for herself.

She had a plan, on the night of her 21st Halloween, to keep things simple and effective for her first ever truly otherformly Halloween: Maryland’s occult forums shared tales of a pumpkin patch that is suspiciously closed on October 31st, not a far drive from Farling University. The story goes that the old owner of the estate was so proud of his pumpkins, but was terrified and obsessed with their safety and size. One night, the night before the county’s pumpkin weighing contest, in a fit of paranoia and desperation, he took a deal with a witch to open a transformative domain, allowing only pumpkins to sit within the yard that night. Still, he didn’t believe that it worked, and at the sound of rustling in his patch he rushed out to protect his gourds, only to be cursed to become the largest gourd of the lot! The plot still stands there, unguarded, and hexed every Halloween night, in order to protect the farmer’s finest picks, if only he could see them.

Astrid had driven up to the farm at 11:30 that night, shocked to see no one else in the vicinity. ‘Maybe it was just a stupid story’ she thought to herself. She had made robust plans to enjoy this hex without fear of losing her humanity forever like that old geezer who made the deal: As soon as possible, she would enter the patch, and let the transformation take hold of her form. Then, later, after her roommate Ingrid was done with her Halloween party, she and her friends would drive up and pick her up from the patch, ready with the reversal spell Astrid had given them ahead of time.

She approached the patch, which seemed smaller and less remarkable than she had expected. Still, she could feel a sort of spiritual energy she had trained her senses towards that made her stomach drop. Certainly there was a hex placed upon this plot, and she was eager to step within its boundary.

The first step within the fenced rectangle was unceremonious. A wet squelch as her black boots met the muddy terrain that pumpkins seemed to find themselves so often at home atop. She’d have to get used to it, unless of course she was to adapt some sort of ‘pumpkin attitude’ naturally? She was still uncertain exactly how turning into a pumpkin would feel, that is, if it was even real. After the twentieth step, she had reached the center of the patch, and decided to stand and really take in her surroundings, while she still could. Her hands slipped into her pockets as she tilted around, taking in the brilliant full moon illuminating a withered tree that bent over the sky; faded, foggy pines in the distance. It really was the perfect Halloween aesthetic, if only she’d start changing! She changed the weight of her hips from left to right as she took in the sounds of distant birds and rustling trees, trying her best to take deep breaths and let the magic wash over her. ‘Wait— rustling trees? But it’s not windy tonight.’ She looked at the spooky tree, only to see its stagnance as proof that that leafy stirring noise was coming from elsewhere.

She took a step to find the source, only to see that she couldn’t. Her left foot could lift off the ground, but not the left. Was it stuck in mud? That was definitely where it was coming from. She could feel the dirt, as if a hole had been made in the bottom end of her shoe, and it had. Wiggling her toes, she could feel as they probed into the muddy surface below her, snaking and twisting themselves beyond her sight, rooting themselves firmly in the ground. Astrid didn’t know what to expect first, but it wasn’t that. In a stupid moment of chickening out, she grabbed her leg and attempted to unroot it, only to lose her balance and fall flat on her ass.

Her vision went blurry for a moment as she directed all note of feeling to her left leg. She felt it throb and worm itself further into the ground, snaking through her ripping shoe like nutrients through the feeding tube that was her leg. She touched her shin only to find it shrunken and withered, drying into a crackley brown-gray texture — roots yearning for the ground. She gasped at the sensation, but more so at the addition of new ones. The deep breath she took felt like it didn’t exit her, or at least her stomach didn’t seem to shrink. She shuffled slightly as each breath felt like an addition, shifting her weight backward. Astrid wasn’t exactly sure what part of her was resting on the ground. A deep breath in, nursing herself to a calm, large state of existence. Ah! There was a sound she recognized from the transformation media she had seen! The popping of a button.

She could just barely see the blurry plastic circle fly off into the distance, her eyes then lowering to the scene of the crime. Her stomach could be seen, even under the light of the moon, bulging in a way she had never seen before. Her stomach didn't pudge up like she had eaten too much food, nor did it round out in the front like she was ‘expecting’; instead, her whole torso homogenized, the subtle oval of her stomach (as seen from above) was literally becoming circular, with both her stomach and her back ballooning out with each fulfilling breath. Her right hand stabilized herself on the ground behind her, as she positioned her legs as if she were delivering a child, allowing the spherical shape of her stomach to begin to overtake her pelvis, reducing the subtleties of her hip bones to a formless soft curve. Her left hand got to work probing her stomach, as she did her best to stare downwards at the growth, against the encouragement of her backwards lurching center of gravity.

As Astrid’s fingers traced circumferences of her torso, she noticed the sensation of protrusions against what was becoming a perfectly spherical shape. It was as if she had placed large vertical ribs inside her that rubbed against her touch; they bulged and hardened, creating perpendicular strips that began to feel more like a hardened vegetable skin than that of a human. She gasped and shuffled herself more upright in an effort to get a better look, and through a squint she swore she could see an earthy orange shade begin to creep up from her underbelly. The second button popped, pushing her backwards again.

The central pumpkin was overtaking her breasts, flattening them out and helping to add shape to what would be the top of her largest gourd— but it was not the only one she was destined to become. After her right foot had burrowed into the ground like a proper pumpkin root, she was hesitant to rest her left on the ground; this left it to take another route, bulging against the restraints of her sock and shoe with an impressively ‘round’ confidence. Her black leather shoe began to swell like a long balloon, the tightly sewn seams of the footwear began to give way to the introduction of a misshapen gourd. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel the tip of her foot lose its digits, playfully wiggling her stumping toes as they amalgamated together into an immobile, hardened form only barely still protected from its muddy home by a weakening rubber sole.

She took more calming, deep breaths in as her consciousness flickered slightly, the experience of being a timeless pumpkin, driven by nature’s whims, seeming all the more enticing. She sighed as extra chins began to lump up next to her original one, bulging and pressing upwards forming the start of the beautiful pumpkin ribs that would make up her gourdy head. Her scalp tingled but she felt no need to itch, simply letting the cool fall breeze brush through her curly hair, the loose strands coiling and melding together into spring-like tendrils. The top of her scalp throbbed like a painless headache, a stump formed that continued to raise and harden like… she couldn’t think of a good analogy at the time. For some reason she had done her research, though, and knew that her head now sported a nifty peduncle! She simply couldn’t not investigate; still, as her hand gripped and pulled at the protrusion to feel its attachment to her soon-to-be pumpkin head, her hand slipped off of it as if her hand was flimsy paper.

Astrid raised her left hand towards the light (as her right seemed more accustomed to propping herself up in the mud than taking any other action) to observe if maybe it had changed. She should have looked at it sooner! Her four longer fingers stuck together like a skintight mitten, her pointed hand letting the moonlight through with slight transparency. Of course, there were the obvious changes, her veins spreading a soft green hue across her entire palm, splitting in new directions from her arm’s axis of symmetry until her veins looked more like a branching tree within her lobed leaf-hand that wiggled against the light breeze.

(Picture goes here)

Her pants began to rip against the pressure of her largest asset as the 100 pound vegetable that was her torso overtook any motivation she had toward having any sort of human semblance. Her consciousness was really fading with each and every breath at this point, her body-pumpkin, head-pumpkin, and foot-pumpkin all feeling more thinly connected with each labored inhale. The vines that made up the rest of her body slithered and roped around themselves, forming a mad tangle of growths within her clothes that connected the different growing gourds. She smiled and closed her eyes, allowing her tendrils to spring up all over her, as two new peduncles erected themselves from locations that couldn’t even be properly described with human anatomy. Her face simplified, smoothing over, as her mouth filled with gunk and seeds, and her nose and ears became no more than rounded warts on an otherwise perfect pick of the patch. She tumbled to the mud within her tattered clothes, no more than a trio of vine tangled pumpkins.

She could still, somehow, see blurred visions of the patch, and hear the rustling of the trees— what she originally thought was a blessing of surveillance quickly became a curse, as she heard the sound of her roommate approaching from a distance.

It really should have been simple. All her friends had to do was find the pumpkins draped in her clothes and take her home to perform the reversal spell. She heard the muffled approach of their playful chatter as they walked right up to where she lay. That was a good sign! She felt two hands rest beneath her weight and rip off her leaves, ‘No! I’m all of me! The leaves and the vines and the–’ oh shit… did she tell them she was going to turn into multiple pumpkins?

Astrid’s friends walked confidently back to their van, laughing about her odd interests, unknowing that what they carried with them, and what they were about to bring back to the realm of humanity was Astrid's bald… decapitated head!”




“Ewwww!!! No no no, too gross, too gross!” Squealed Ingrid, spattering s’more across the campfire circle.

“Oh come on! You were fine with all that grody transformation description but not a little blood?” Astrid teased.

“Well it’s just… it’s different when it’s you! I don’t want you to die!! Especially if it was my fault!”

“Oh stop… we know you wouldn’t make a mistake like that, you’re very careful, that’s how you balance out my insanity.” Astrid and Ingrid laughed.

“Anyways I don’t want to hear the rest, I think I get the gist, that’s enough scary stories. Anything else we can do?”

Astrid pulls out a Ouija board, smiling like a madwoman. “Are you kidding me? It’s Halloween! What can’t we do?”