"Oz—" The single word takes so much from her. She has to use so much of her lips, her mouth, feel the movement and the smack and the roll of her tongue pressing against her ivory teeth, the smaller two down at the bottom of her throat, and it comes wet and slick and foul. Her mouth is so filled with the fluids of speech that she can feel the waves they make, feel the filamentous strands they leave against the tender flap of skin connecting her tongue to the bottom of her mouth, feel them drip back down her throat. Everything flaps and everything moves and she can feel all of it at once, muscle going limp and coming animate and boneless, slimy intent that is at once hers and not hers.
She continues speaking, not out of will, but because there's nothing else she knows to do, nothing else she can become. There's a mistake here, a mistake that needs to be corrected, and if she doesn't, then they'll charge on ahead, not knowing what's been written before they ever entered the scene.
"Oz, you are agreeing to something you do not know the terms to."
She's not really registering their words, of course. She is, but she isn't. They belong to someone new now, someone who cannot be approached for comment, but someone who all the same sends back commands to her drooling mouth and her slug-trail throat and she forces air back up and through the creeping blood stringing her together and she speaks.
Her body fails her, again. More exertion sends more blood painting carnations on her proper attire, the clothes that she was addressed specifically to wear to this junction. The red and the darker dyes absorb some, but everywhere else poppies bloom up and out of the fabric weave, the red tide rolling in and smothering her under her own weight. She'll choke either way. It's just more fitting, like this.
Oz is moving, again. Already Princess Miranda has decided that she doesn't like that. It irritates something in her brain, still not looking at them and yet catching the flitting out of the corner of her eyes, agitating the membranes and making the grey tissue grow red with inflammation. She doesn't like it. She can't stand it. She can't, won't, move her eyes to look at them again and yet she sees it, sees the flutter and the flick and something about it presses in on every corner in her vision, makes them all grow narrower and narrower and thinner and thinner, movement clouding her in, pushing her down.
There's still blood crawling down her throat, trying to seep into her stomach. The blood over her eyes, trying to crust them over, further gives her more movement, movement detached from the floor and from the walls. Movement that crawls under her skin and scales, twitching legs rolling against her embedded osteoderms, sticking down into every joint and vertebrae so that they catch and rip when she moves, more pressing in, until the end of every bone is shrouded in a fine coat of furred arthropod legs.
There was a point to all of this, right? There was a point to her being here, to doing this, to being so hollow and so full and everything moving inside of her and outside of her, growing thick and heavy and poisoning her with nitrogenous waste that sticks to her scales and holds her down against the silt? There was a reason she had been brought here, had been laid low, had been demanded as sacrifice? Why was she the perfect victim to hollow, made in just the correct shape to void her of all she might've been?
Oz sets something down in front of her, and her stomach clamps. She feels it in her throat, bobbing like a buoy tossed in the waves, like an old child's toy, one of the little floaters that they would pull along on strings. It fights against the roiling currents, fights against the great upswell with its tiny, flimsy filaments, and then it breaks, and the wave rises up instead.
The muscles of her abdomen contract, pull. They find their notches where they sit, tied down to her gastralia, and they heave ho, fluttering and pulling in towards her spine, making her stomach follow suit, leaving it concave for a precious moment against all of her fine clothes. Her body dips for a precarious moment between her ribcage and her waist, abdominal wall squeezing in on itself, tightening and tensing so that she's coiled up so tight and so tense that there's nowhere else for her to go, each muscle knotting together as a great void punches her in her stomach.
Her head dips, thrust towards the floor, jaws open as stomach acid is forced out, sharp and acrid and stinging in her throat, her nose, her gills. She is a merfolk, first of all, and an abyssal second. Both mean the acid of her stomach is strong, made to melt bone and render it down into something she can digest, but there is no bone that comes up now. It swirls with blood, with chunks of her own torn gills, and it'll damage the floor if she leaves it there. She shouldn't leave it there. There's nothing she can do but leave it there.
She coughs, chokes, spits up more of nothing but acid, dripping out of her gills with the same force that ejected it from her stomach, making her gasp loud and hacking. The heat burns through her, burns through the tender skin and membrane and open wound, stabs all the way up and through to her tongue, roiling in the agony and the hurt and the confusion, the overwhelming loss of everything that she is. This is what happens to discards. This is what happens to the leavings from the great hollowing, the parts of her that she didn't need, the parts of her that were not her and thus should have been removed long ago.
Princess Miranda's claws are digging into the cushion. She cannot remember doing so, but she's busy thinking about the sickness and the hurt and void that grows and grows and punches against her stomach to make her muscles flutter and twitch again so that she tries to cough up something she doesn't have. She's thinking about the feeling of hands beneath her skin, about the pain in her gills that drowns out everything else, she's thinking that she'll need to leave this outfit with her tailors again, to be repaired, and that they'll be upset with her in the wordless way of someone who can't say anything to the contrary.
Her head swims, bobbed along, punctuated only by retching that's now starting to die down. The wounds on her face have opened further, drip down angrily over her mouth to mix with her spittle. Every part of her feels vile. Every part of her hurts. Every part of her belongs to someone else, someone who has laid her out and partitioned off each and every one of her pieces.
It's too much. No one is made to handle this. Not even princesses.
Her mouth opens again, gapes. This time Princess Miranda doesn't spit, but makes a high whine so sharp and so loud that it stabs down into the heart with all the same burn. It comes again, repeated softly in a tiny pattern like beating wings, like the fluttering of her heart against her ribcage, like the pulse she can feel in her gills. She does not lift her head. She does not speak. She is laid low, laid beneath, whining and crying and making a distress call that has no translation and no word to name it, only a feeling of a hope so crushed and destroyed that there is nothing that can keep her safe anymore.
janainaart
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
titsay
blakekathryn
prguitarman
