<<<PREV

~

If anyone's reading this after May 2016 and curious about the state of this submission: It used to have art, now it doesn't. I didn't want to re-upload the story, so it's still here.

Basically a little fan-fiction for WhiteMantis, a sort of cross-over of ideas: 'What if Nae was exposed to an Amethystinian-type snakey situation?'

---

In Dreams - Part 2 - 'The Enmired Monsters' ~Or~ 'A Peculiar Place'

~ by Amethystine

---

--When we left our heroine, she had just been bitten by a small slithery beast. Said beast had arrived inside an egg, which was itself within a mysterious package. Once bitten, Nae had fallen to the floor, knocking her head and passing out.--

~

Nae awoke, and it was dark. She was not in her room. She was not in the teahouse at all, in fact. She blinked a few times, feeling the bare dirt under her fingers and scythes. She sat up and fretted for a moment about her hair and her kimono getting soiled before looking around to realize that although she could clearly see that she was in a forest of some kind, it was unlike any place she had ever been.

All at once, she could sense a number of things that were unnervingly incorrect about the world around her. The dirt was too fresh, first of all.. it wasn't packed down by the footfalls of the world, as it should have been. It was as if the whole area had just been turned, for planting, like a flower garden. Also, the trees around the clearing she had found herself in were too slender and smooth to be like any trees she had seen. They didn't have any sort of widening at the base to denote regular roots, they just emerged at a constant and consistent thickness and extended upwards.. forever? She could not see any branches or treetops, just the dense fog that surrounded her meek little spot in the freakish forest.

It was night time. Or.. it was dark, but it was too warm to be a real night. Paradoxically, this thought made her shiver, but not out of lack of heat. How could it be dark in the warmth of day? There was a suffuse sort of illumination to the world, that made it easy to see within the confines of the oppressive mist, as if there were two or even three enormously full moons somewhere over her, though she could not see them. With this strange, ethereal lightness of the land, she could see, as she stood up, that the dirt had an alien tint of purple and blue to its normal dark hue.

Beginning to walk in what she desperately hoped was a good direction, despite having no way of knowing if it was, the lost little mantis began to pass by the strange, twisty trees. The streamlined trunks all seemed to be contorted into weird winding paths as they had grown upwards. At least, she assumed they had grown. On more than one occasion, she spun around, thinking she had detected movement in the corner of her large eyes.. beginning to become convinced that the movement was actually the 'trees', further shifting or spiralling themselves.. always outside of her view.

During her walk, upon which the land never changed and the fog never lifted, the insectine individual also began to notice the lack of sound. The world she was in was not mute, but there wasn't the normal rustle of the wind or the creak of trees.. although there was a rustling sound, forever at the periphery of her perception. It was an odd raspy sort of sliding sound.. which seemed familiar, despite it being utterly out of place in a forest. She must have heard it somewhere before, and she puzzled over it intensely as she plodded along through the soft soil, starting to seriously suspect the security of her sanity.

After some time of wondering in the weird world of winding trees and turquoise tinted and tilled dirt, she figured out what had been occupying her, aside from how she had gotten there. The constant rustling sound all around her was nearly the same as the tiny and twisted 'sproutling' had made as it terrorized her, gliding about under her garments.. the same sound as that slippery sliding.. just amplified and expanded, increased and larger, all around her, in the distance, in every direction.

As her mind struck upon that solution, her foot also struck upon something sticking up from the ground slightly. It was something smooth and rounded, not unlike a partially buried root, which worked perfectly to capture the tip of her long, chitinous leg in mid-stride, and cause her to topple forward. Topple she did, but not back onto the dirt from which she had risen earlier.

The mantis fell into a massive mire of meaty, thick 'roots', like the one she had tripped over. While the fog might have played a part in keeping her from being aware of the large patch of curving, twisting shapes she found herself in, she could have sworn that the path before her had been clear, as it always had been, for as long as she'd been trekking forward.

Soft, under a thick sort of tough skin, were the large roots upon which Nae had fallen. All at once, she knew that they were exactly like the trees.. and that both of them were giant versions of her 'pet', although in different colours. She wasn't sure how she could not have made that connection before, but there it was. The fog of this bizarre place permeated her mind, it did not allow her to see things until it wanted her to.

Able to see that she was at the centre of a sizable patch of the tightly twisted and knotted giant monster-body, despite how comfortable it was to lay on, Nae was frozen in terror. What did it mean that the reddish brown and smoky beige coloured loops where half-buried in the dirt? Was this creature dead? Had it not yet lived, a failed 'tree', unlike the others around her? Had it been buried, then partially uncovered over a long period of time?

A sudden shifting beneath her as the coils came to life all at once broke the mantis of her mental meandering, as well as her frozen state. She let out a soft cry of alarm and surprise and bolted up onto her hands and knees upon the gradually awakening shapes under her. She had been laying flat upon them before, and it was only as she scanned around for the nearest spot of clear ground to scurry toward that she realized how relaxed she had felt while resting on the rounded sections of brown body. She could have dozed off while pondering the origins of the bizarre impromptu bedding she had quite literally stumbled onto. The truth of that seemed impossible as she scrambled away from the centre of the increasingly lively patch, but she could not deny it.

The rustling noise she had obsessed over during her journey to that place had concentrated itself to just the jumble of loops under her, and it was once again all around her.. until she flopped off to one side of the swamp of smooth-skinned 'sproutlings'. And sprout, they did! New portions were pulling themselves free from the faintly fuchsia floor of the forest all the time, the patch swelling larger as the loops slid up and down, in and out of the ground as if it was water.. water that never seemed to stay on their hide. Somehow, the soil never stained the pristine forms as they wound and twisted, undulating and tunneling up and down, threading through the earth, in and out in the winding paths that seemed to have no beginning and no end.

Something of a beginning appeared before long, though. A head, like a much magnified model of her miniature monster, made its way up from the ground as seamlessly as a needle through silk. An oddly two-tined tongue almost immediately began to appear from the tip of the snout, in much the same effortless manner, moving out of the blunt, wedge-shaped tip of the lengthy body.. unlike the emerging front end of the creature, it began to recede and disappeared back inside the snout that was still slowly surfacing. The rapidly flicking and flapping, glistening black thing had slipped out and back into the lips of the large beast several times by the time that its eyes slipped free of the dirt.

The eyes, Nae will never forget those blank, glowing blue eyes, burning with an unblinking intensity, seeming to stare at her eternally.

The head was pointed almost straight up, and she was looking at it from the side as it ascended upon its long neck of a body, so only one of the two orbs was visible to her, but she still felt more penetrated by that single cerulean sphere than she had ever been by any number of eyes upon her arthropod peers. She wanted to scream, and her hands clasped over her mouth, her scythes folding defensively across her front.. but no sound came from her throat.

Taking no notice of the mantid's fear, the slender creature continued to grow from the ground, and revealed that it was, in one manner of speaking, a sproutling with branches. What could only be described as a pair of shoulders began to show with the upward crawling of the creature, followed by appropriately attached arms, pressed tightly to the sides of the smooth shape as it slid clear from the soil.

Nae tucked her legs a bit more tightly up towards herself as she sat on the ground, watching the somewhat less beastly-seeming being bloom in its bizarre way. She was frightened. Wasn't she? She asked herself if she shouldn't be running away. She didn't know where she would go, of course, but did that matter? She was convinced that she should have been running for some time, that she should already have been a great distance away. If that was true, though, why wasn't she?

She tried to come up with excuses for her lack of long-distance dashing.. maybe she wanted to stay with this creature to demand that it return her to her home, or.. maybe she thought the beast was rooted to the ground, like the trees, that it wouldn't be able to reach her past a certain distance.. maybe she was paralysed with fear.. or she was cursed. She knew she could move, though and she knew she was too close to be out of reach, if it really was rooted in one spot.. she was merely mentally dancing around the simple truth: She was utterly fascinated by the fearsome, flowing form that flexed before her. If anything, she was most frightened by her fascination itself.. she felt she should have been horrified, but instead a wholly different "H" word rolled around in her head as she peered at the smooth snout that, by then, stood high above the other gliding sections of sproutling body.

Handsome.

Her hands clamped tighter over her mouth, as if she had just spoken that word aloud, as though it was the most offensive and forbidden word in the world. But.. as she realized with a lightening of her tension.. she wasn't in her world, clearly.

A new section of the streamlined body caught Nae's eye as she attempted to reseal that revelation within her mind, distracting herself with the steady progress of the creature's self-unearthing. There was a thick part of its body that was arching up out of the dirt, and after a dip under the surface, she could see a more slender section, clearly continuing from the other, which was nearer to her, also arching up, having just appeared from underground. The geisha was certain that the tip of the monster's tail would be a short distance along this last, thinner piece, tapering off to a point, like the smaller one that had hatched in front of her.

Instead of any sort of taper, though, the thin section of unnervingly attractive body continued at that same width until it actually began to thicken again, long after Nae had imagined a tailtip. But it wasn't really thickening, it was simply a slight bulging to form another head. Nae calmed slightly at seeing this new head emerging, as it meant she was right, the slender section she had been peering at WAS coming to an end. Just not the kind she thought.

After a short few moments of relief, the bug girl did a double take, looking from one head to the other numerous times. Such a development shouldn't have calmed her at all! There was a second scary creature there in front of her! And both of them appeared to have no visible end. At the least, though, another beast explained the presence of the copious coils. Nevertheless, the mantid found herself most scared of her self for not freaking out about the addition of another strange organism directly in front of her.

While Nae fretted, the new beast.. which, Nae realized, wasn't new at all.. was revealed to have a pair of slim arms, much like his counterpart. Also like the other, this revealed head had glowing, featureless eyes. A deep piercing purple, in contrast to the lighter blue of the other. She could also discern another difference in the dim light, through the fog: The blue-eyed beast had long slanting streaks of lighter brown upon its sides, which faded as they got higher, towards the back of the body, which had a strip of dark skin along its spine. The violet-eyed one had thick, sharp-edged gold blotches within the dark brown of its back. The 'new' one was also a deeper, reddish brown, as opposed to the lighter wet-sand shade of the 'original' one.

The thick, arched portion and the thin one she had observed on the second individual, which she then knew to be its neck and torso, had pulled up what lay between them in the dipped down part, and it was there that the shoulders and arms had been hidden. Said limbs now flexed and rose slowly to uproot themselves from their resting places, easily pulling up from deep in the dirt.

Were they just that powerful? To move so freely in the forest floor, like it was a fluid.. or was their might more magical, and they shifted in these impossible ways through sheer undeniable will? And.. had Nae just called the new creature a 'he'? She could deny it no longer. Both of them were obviously, potently male, despite their sleek shapes, if her knowledge of anatomy was to be trusted. On the other hand, she didn't think she could trust any of her prior worldly knowledge at that point.

Both of them rose up, their hands coming free from the dirt at the same time. Again, the mantis marveled at how they were utterly pristine and unsoiled by the earth they had just been entrenched within. Their whole forms slid and slipped around on the ground, the last of them coming loose as they stood their torsoes up at a height that seemed appropriate, given their size. The sound of their bodies rustling about, that same rustling that had followed her ever since she awoke in this strange place, increased in volume as their forms were completely free, having been rising with them all along.

The timid observer could not stop watching the winding shifting of their bodies.. she'd have explained that she was trying to determine if, perhaps they were rooted, their tails still stuck deep in the ground.. but in the end, she'd have to admit that she just wanted to watch the graceful slithering movements of their sinuous, perfect forms.

Regardless of the reasons for her grounded gaze, the geisha made an important discovery while her eyes remained locked on the languid loops. She spied a section of smooth body that had both blotches on the back and streaks on the sides, an odd combination of the two patterns on the two different creatures. Furthermore, that area possessed a shade of brown that was somehow directly in the middle of the blue-eyed one's lighter, polished wood tones and the darker, reddish hue of the purple-eyed one. She couldn't tell which of the two, 'Lighter' or 'Darker', as she had unconsciously named them, owned that portion, as it lay right in the middle of the twisting, writhing pile.

In the middle..?

~

End of Part 2

---

NEXT>>>

.