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This thread contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

body horror

Black Spire, Black Spire, clawing at her mind—or is that her? Her, wrenching her claws and teeth deep into the conscience and being unwilling to let go, because she craved and craved. She hadn't slept, eaten, or drank in the days before this one; she'd laid aside the hotbed of His influence and closed her eyes, let the Oil seep from her wounds until their residual heat was enough to clot and cauterize.

While she lay, the whispers grew and enveloped her in their embrace. Even as her eyes were open, they remained. A crushing embrace at times, a gentle nudge at others. Reassurances that He was here, all the same—and the most peculiar promise of power. It thrummed beneath her collarbone, echoed through her ribs, and urged her to go. Away from His spire, but just for a moment. She could come back afterwards, the whispers swore, but first, she needed to find a place to upend this.

The snow coating Ursa had lent her had melted long ago, but the stifling—and shocking—warmth of this cavern leeched what moisture had remained. Draconua lifted her head, sanguine faceplate and gnarled burns glistening in the orb-light. Pinhole eyes fixated on the near-endless horizon of rippling cyan, then the sweeping curve of white sands and verdant undergrowth. Sulphur and brimstone burnt thickly in her nostrils, almost reminiscent of the scent of void-fire as it thrashed through the leaves and any flesh in its way. The Hound peeled her lips back, barbed tongue sweeping over every pointed tooth and slathering them in Oily residue.

Entropic fire… a grand idea, except for that beastie clawing more intensely at her throat, her temples. A set of hooked talons—her own, rest assured—stole for it, tracing the curve of her own musculature and combing through a tangle of coarse underfur. Her stone throbbed, calling to her most base instinct; what had been programmed into her by inundations of Chaos: an intense need to spread

Draconua listened to it the same as one might've the crash of waves or susurrus of leaves. She found calm in it, and she embraced it.

Yet, it did not reach back in any way but to abort. Flesh detached and ran slick down her gullet, and she retched. A gag reflex or anything physical was not at fault for her dry heave, but a desire to see that pitiful little hunk of half-formed meat spill across the sand. The Hound stared at it where it laid, almost long enough for it to sizzle and pop into Oil. Without hesitation, she lurched down and choked it back down.

Dissatisfaction burned hotter than the sludge ambling toward her stomach. It charred her innards an inky black and brought a surge of whisperings, of nightmarish blurrings between here and then, a cacophony of sound and color—!

The beast tossed her head as if to cast her sacreligious halo aside, and turned away with a rattling breath. Again, her tongue swiped over her teeth, and again there was a thrumming. Every whisper, abstract as they were in reality, pointed in the same direction: instinct. Her. Nowhere else but her. A promise, but of what sort? Hussaresque wings spread wide, stabbed once at the air. Lips peeled further back and bared stained fangs to the air. Draconua howled into the wind, and Leo simply sang in response.

Again, she pushed; "again," she growled for only her ears; again, she felt her stone throb and churn in response—and was it the whispers that went quiet, or was it the gut-wrenching agony that drowned them out?

Draconua spread her limbs wide as she arched her back, craned her neck. Shallow breaths wracked through every part of her frame, stifled by expanding and shifting ribs and organs. Tumors of new flesh and sinew bulged beneath her skin, swelling uncontrollably. They burst like abscesses, weeping Oil. Suddenly, too, there was a claw tearing from the rest with a sickening crrrack! as newly formed ligaments snapped bones into place away from the rest. Another, another—each wrenching a wheezing roar from the bottom of her lungs, which were stretched beyond their capacity and half exposed to the air before rapidly multiplying epithelium could rush to protect them. Elbows split away from themselves, ripping away from the rest of the legs in a violent tear. Mangled wristbones connected the detaching limbs to the excess of claws.

The body fell with a wet thump! and so did the Sleepless Chaos.

Her shoulders rolled, wings thrashing against the dead weight. Hind legs kicked themselves free of a second pair. Her tail convulsed like a poisoned serpent to liberate itself from the duplicate. Neckbones clipped through her windpipe, and for a moment, Draconua couldn't breathe. Fortunate, perhaps, for the denizens of Leo; the guttural roar she might've released as her second neck split—and a jaw started to form—would have awakened even the dead. Blackness shot across her vision, some twelve eyes and optic nerves bulging from a half-formed faceplate and sliding forwards. Grey matter replicated itself in a Oily mass, visible for just that moment as sanguine horns caught on curled horns. She barely had the presence of mind to toss her head downward and free its head from her own jaw.

Oil sloughed off her in waves, all from the gaping holes those tumors had left. It sutured those wounds and it tainted the sand with its blackness. Flanks shuddered, bones and flesh crackling back into place at last. Five thousand years of torturous war, and hardly a fate has been worse than this. But, she could look over at the supine form, slicked-over in newness like the most precious (and unholy) neonate. She could look, and she could watch as the world smeared into monochrome and then nothing.

Not a single vision of war raged through her mind, nor did the song of the sea. She lay in bitter, putrid silence, never to witness the first ragged breaths of her own creation.

— Exit Draconua —

It snapped awake with a rattling hiss. Base instinct drove it to its feet, and it rattled shortly. Wristbones were broken, they rolled—it stumbled on them, gasping growls accompanying each disoriented step into the light. Shaky, rail-thin limbs had it pacing a few feet away from the unconscious body of its mother. Every bit of hide was stretched over too-thin ribs and bones. There was hardly any membrane between the crooked points of its wings. Its tail hung limp behind it.

For all the suffering it'd caused, it was barely half two-thirds the size of its mother. All in all, a pitiful thing… but, it was vicious. The first sign of movement in the brush had it running off like a shot with a snarl. Poorly-formed limbs be damned, the loathsome copy would tear and consume like its makeup demanded.

— Exit Draconua JR. —