A beautiful commission by  creepy_gun

Arhulians not only can keep occupants inside their bodies alive, their wombs have fine biological tools that are capabable of medical wonders - able to mend injuries and congenital ails that even present day (our world) have yet to best. Some would say that in this (their) world, Arhulians have incredible healing magic. But the tiny fraction of the population that is magically inclined know that is incorrect. Arhulian healing is beyond what even magic can accomplish. (In this setting, healing magic just speeds up normal biological healing.)

This may be pushing it for my usual content, but the ability to use their bodies as living medical suites is important to Arhulian lore and culture. If Geiger can make forced pregnancy phallus head aliens and make a marketable hollywood juggernaut, I don't think I'm rocking the boat all that much with Arhulians. =P

CW: Mild Body horror and vore (played for sci-fi)

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William lay there on the side of the forest path. His body ached with each move. His movements were sluggish and labored. He needed to find the road, without the road, he would be dead. His battered body jittered and trembled as he attempted to stand, for all of thirty seconds before landing on his tail. William let out a yelp of pain, and sighed. The Rat looked up at the sky. He was far from the gaslamp lighting from the city. The stars were brilliant, piercing the black heavens with pinpricks of light - at least the ones he could see through the one remaining, cracked lens of his prescription glasses. How did he get here again? He paused and coughed violently. He remembered now.

He was supposed to be a patient to an apothecary. Turns out, they were little more than a con artist. Their treatments were a complete sham. William tried to shake his head to clear the fog in his mind, but the movements just made him dizzy. William couldn't recall the exact series of events, but the end result was clear. He was left for dead in the middle of the woods to let nature and the elements do him to avoid murder charges. That man was a coward to their very core! William cursed. He could feel the cool autumn air seeping in through the holes in his torn trousers. “Damn it all…” He muttered as he fumbled through his pockets to see if he had his lighter and cigarettes at least for one more smoke. Before he could find where his lighter had gone, the sound of something close caught his attention.

William cursed under his breath. There was no telling what kind of animals were out in the deep woods like this. He shuffled backwards until his back hit a tree. From the silhouette alone, the creature was massive. It must have been a grizzly bear - a colossal one at that! His already sick and infected lungs gasped for air as his heart thundered in his chest. Was this how it was going to end? The large shadow moved forward, its body caught the light as well as their eyes - all six of them.

Panic had already sunk in for William, but as the moon and stars illuminated the creature as it came into view, the Rats blood ran cold. This thing was no bear. The creature had a large squarish muzzle, with three pairs of eyes on their head, starting off small and getting larger as they ascended reward towards the back of the skull. They had a piercing, deep purple iris that seemed to reflect more light than was possible. All six were focused squarely on William. This thing moved forward, its stride being more like a glide as William looked down and saw not feet, but large, bony spikes protruding from where its shins should be. The creature circled the location William was in, and presented its broadside to him. William blinked to be sure of what he saw. Twelve legs, arranged into pairs of six. This thing was centipedal in its shape and locomotion despite being of flesh.

Death sentence as it was, a bear was familiar. This creature on the other hand - clad in fur, yet bearing six eyes and twelve legs - was utterly foreign, and the mystery of what this creature would entail put more fear into William than death itself. Beyond the cold air and fatigue, William trembled as this huge creature slowly paced back and forth in front of him. His hands unconsciously gripped the ground for anything he could grab. He then found something hard, jagged, and lumpy - a rock. With no hesitation he picked it up and hurled it at the creature. It was a hail mary if anything, but William’s body was dominated by instinct at this juncture. Raising a single, three-fingered hand with digits that looked like stout cones of leather, the creature caught it casually.

The creature caught it.

The word spilled out of his mouth. “What?” William wasn’t sure if this was a trick of the light, but as his hands patted the ground, he found another rock to toss at the creature.

There was a sharp crack as it was intercepted mid-air by the stone he had previously thrown.

William’s fear was overwritten by astonishment. The creature… hit a moving target midair in the middle of the night? William knew nothing of this dodecapod, but it surely wasn’t an animal. The creature with unsettling grace and silence glided forward to him as their twelve legs brought their long body forward. William froze. The being peered at him with all six of its eyes from high above. Its head was at least eight feet up off the ground. The creature leaned forward and down to almost eye level with William. He could not do anything. With what little strength he had left, his body dedicated it to immobilizing him with fear.

The being reached its arms forward. Their hands were huge, clawless things, easily capable of holding his head as one would a large citrus. It reached to his shirt and undid the buttons with one hand.

Williams' eyes pulled wider. The other hand reached into his pocket, and pulled out his lighter, working the mechanism with ease despite being tiny in the hands of this giant. In the comparatively blinding glow of a lit flame, that streaked across the crack in his remaining lens, it dawned on William. This creature was intelligent. Not just intelligent. More than that. It immediately recognized clothing and tools. Was it… a person?

Still, frozen, William could only watch with trepidation as he heard dull, muffled pops of joints from within the being. From in between the ribs of the furred monster, numerous wiry limbs extended out like snakes from a burrow. Some ended in hands, others ended in what looked like surgical implements made of sculpted bone, a few in needles. William’s breaths were short and rapid, frozen, he wanted to move, but a strange sensation came over him. He felt as if his body was wrapped in several layers of clothes; not a crushing weight, but one that made his already weak movements glacial. The creature grabbed his arm, and moved the syringe-like appendage towards his arm. William winced, and waited for what came next. There was an itch. Was this creature probing for a vein?

William couldn't bear to wait any longer and he opened his eyes to see what horror was going to unfold. A membranous sack at the base of the needle was swollen, not unlike a gorged mosquito - albeit a colossal one. The creature had already taken his blood and withdrew their needle. With faint schlurks, all the thin, bony limbs retracted back into the monsters’ body. There was a faint pinhead of blood where he had been stuck. “Oh…” William muttered, surprised the deed was done and over within mere seconds. William peered into the six purple rings that made up the irises of the being, gazing with more curiosity than fear.

Despite the fear wracking his body, Williams mind ran with unusual alacrity. Why would this thing need his blood? Surely a beast larger than a grizzly couldn't subsist on one man's blood, let alone a fraction of it. But before the Rat could ponder any further, consciousness failed him.



William felt weightless, yet pressed from all sides as if he were in deep water. He instinctively tried to breathe, but his chest would not inflate. He flailed around in a panic for several seconds before he realized something was wrong. He did not need to breathe. “What the hell is happening?” He muttered to himself. He pressed his hand to his chest, and felt that he had no heart beat. The rat turned pale.

Was he dead? Did that Arhulian kill him?

William paused. “Are-Rule-Lee-An?” He said slowly, sounding out the foreign word that had escaped his mouth. He had never heard or read such a word before. Where did it come from? Was Arhulian the name of the creature? The Rat’s mind raced as he scrambled to try and find some kind of bearing in the featureless void cloaking him. “Arhulian… I don’t know how, but that name. It is the name of the being that found me. What is going on?” He said to himself, thinking out loud to hear his own voice for some level of stimulation.

William looked around. The void was pitch black, featureless, yet when gazing upon his own naked body, he seemed to be perfectly illuminated. No source of light wherever he looked, yet he could see just fine. Before he could grapple with his mortality, something caught his attention. William was moving downward, as one would sinking in an ocean. As he descended, he saw the black void around him disperse like fog. His feet touched something, and the world around him came alight.

Stunned, William flinched when he saw an entire world spring from his feet. The sky was a deep purple with hints of blue. Stars twinkled high above, and yet somehow further than the stars themselves, waves of purple veins slowly shimmered across the celestial dome, as if this little universe was somehow submerged underwater. The ground was a perfectly smooth plane of purple-black obsidian, covered in a thin film of water that came up to the middle of his toes. William stood there, smitten with awe as he appeared to be standing on an entire ocean, still as glass. A world of amaranthine beauty, yet utterly alien all at once.

William gazed upon the dense, brilliant stars that painted the sky. They were crystal clear pinpricks of light. He rubbed his eyes, unlike the usual times he’d bonk into his own glasses, nothing was there. “I… I can see? What is this place?” He said. William paused. His mouth did not move, but a sound was made. He was too disoriented the first time, though he certainly noticed now. “Is… this the afterlife? It can’t be. It’s nothing like I have heard!” He muttered to himself. William turned in a circle as he peered against the horizon for any kind of feature in this endless plane. A landmark of any kind. He prayed he wasn’t dumped in some kind of featureless purgatory. There was something that he spotted, a shimmering light in the distance at ground level. William moved towards it.

William noticed something else as he moved. He was in immaculate condition. His injuries and pain were gone. He tried to focus to sense anything, and all he could feel was a tingling, tickling inside his veins that reached to every corner of his body. He was almost overwhelmed at first, but the more he thought about it, the more it felt like the rippling pins and needles sensation someone would experience after a great pain had been extinguished. He felt relaxed - in fact he felt the best he ever had in over a decade. As he approached the lavender shimmering light, he made out its appearance. It looked like the Arhulian creature, laying on their back.

As William approached, he saw that the lavender figure was like transparent smoke. He could see inside them. See their bones, veins, nerves, tiny rivers of blood surging every which way. Then, finally, a patch of white light inside their womb. The skeleton looked like that of a… Rat. William swallowed. What could this ominous figure mean? He reached towards the huge outline of the Arhulian on their back. His hand passed through the figure like mist. With great trepidation, he touched the cloudy silhouette of the Rat inside the Arhulians abdomen. His hand encountered resistance as he touched its right bicep. Suddenly, William recoiled in shock as he felt something… on his right bicep.

“What in the…? What is this?” He said, as shivers ran down his form. This silhouette was him. It was inside the Arhulians womb. A thought that would ordinarily fill him with a deep aversion to the matters of the explicit, but this circumstance elicited more fear and questions that made his aversion to sexual matters seem quaint in comparison. William was revulsed at the suggestion of where he was, but he could not break his gaze. He looked. His body was entwined with fleshy tendrils that coiled around him as vines would. These “vines” rooted into his body, connecting to his nerves and veins. Blood was flowing through him. The Arhulians blood. Six pairs of arm-like appendages were inside the womb, and they grasped at his body from both sides like a team of surgeons.

William, trembling, reached out to the skeletal mist of his body and touched it yet again. His chest felt where he touched. With a dizzying blur, the purple world faded away around him. With a jolt, William was awake. Inside the Arhulian. It wasn’t just a bizarre, hyper vivid dream.

William tried to move, but his body felt like it was wrapped in a suit of lead. It took great effort to move even a few millimeters. As he squirmed, the uteral hands of the Arhulian gripped his, and caressed his head, holding him firm. William couldn't breathe… yet his breath did not seem to run out. Taking a few minutes in the pitch darkness of his cocoon of flesh, William noticed something - or rather, a lack of something. His pain was completely gone. The weight of his pained lungs were absent too. Everything from his injuries to his terminal illness vanished. The changes he experienced in that dream; they were real. “It can’t be… is this creature… Arhulian, are they healing me?” He thought. This time, no sound was made. His thoughts remained inside his mind. The arms around him gripped him tightly, a feeling of maternal warmth washed over William.

“I think… I understand.” He relaxed, and allowed his body to lay without tension or fear.

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