The Second Conception
"In sleep, we are at our most vulnerable. In our dreams, where every memory, both good and> bad, can lay siege to our hapless minds, we have no defense. We can be tricked into> believing that pain, smells, sensations of touch such as heat and cold, textures of liquids> and brittle solids, and sounds of men and nature, are real to us. Sometimes, when we least> expect it, a dream can become as tangible as to be more powerful an experience than even> reality itself."> -Commodus
Carol was by this time, gone forever. It was much like death, this reality, in which she
was but a smear in the psyche of this ancient, everpresent shadow. Her existence was like
the blink of an eye, the bat of the tail, to the Hellhound Matron, who had assimilated and
absorbed so many women before her, strong women, into her singular mindest. So easily and
willfully did they submit to her power, they were no longer separate in any way, but a
uniform, processed spread in the beast's collective conscious, lost forever, unable to ever
be separated, nothing on their own and only a small, dispensable piece of the whole. But the smear that was Carol held more weight than any other entity in its entire
multidimensional existence.
Though carrion, Carol's strong memories and emotions would not be ground away. They were
like rocky fossils, so delicate, but deep in the earth, persistent. The earth would try as
it might, with water, heat, movement, and age, to destroy and assimilate these fragments of
a long-lost being, but could not. It could twist them and change them and hollow them, but
their marks would remain for aeons.
Carol still existed, as a ghost, an imprint. She existed through the footprints she left
in the jungle's soft topsoil, and as a ghost in Carl's memories. She could never be a
complete entity on her own, anymore. The Hellhound Matron was her final testament, and it
orever warped the memories of her so-far-surviving husband held of her.
Looking at the hellhound was like looking at a tombstone, or a corpse. Carl held
the instinctual and unalienable comprehension that this beast, it WAS Carol. It's all that
was left of Carol. It was what Carol was made of, it's what she became. The bristling
fur, the devilish, bloodstained teeth, the deep, hollow, black eyes. [a] They were to him
the decay of the lovely form that he held and enjoyed, that was once so full of life and
love and warmth, that held him back, that he shared his very essence of life with.
But feeling this tomb of Carol, feeling its fur, its hot breath, in contempt or compassion
or confusion, was to Carl's instincts like facing the very essence of undead. There was no
literal corpse risen from the dead, but a being warped and made of the metaphorical,
metaphysical, and philosophical corpse of his Carol. There was no literal decay, but
there was only the barest indications of what once was Carol; those few memories and
feelings as petrified bones deep in the soil, waiting to be unearthed, hoping to be
unearthed, before they're ground away forever in the churning and hot crust, before they're
buried too deep to ever be reached again.
Only Carl could hope to unearth these bones, like he had countless other times, on
countless expeditions, deep in the distant places of the world. He was able to give life
to these long-dead peoples and cultures through the discovery of their remnants and their
arts. Perhaps this would work, if he could only find out how to dig here.
But, what seemed like some time ago, Carl had given up.
An undetermined amount of time passed with the Hellhound pacing, throwing itself. it
turned on Carl in anger and hate, it slunk to him in sorrow, it howled in desperation. It
expressed and followed through the whole range of emotions it could here, deep in this dank
chamber, dark, dripping, humid. The stone door was ground away with deep gouges but the
beast's unnatural, predatory claws never dulled. Its teeth gnashed and never wore, its
ability and power to kill never at all waned through all its self-abuses, mentally and
physically.
Here, Carl had given up. He'd given up on love. He looked blankly at the hellhound like
he would a gravestone. Sometimes he wanted to tear up, but his tears had all been shed.
There was a large puddle of blood around his leg, where he had not moved it for all this
time. Hours? Hours and hours, perhaps they'd dragged on into a day. The blood was
already coagulating on his wound in a flaky, yellow, oily scab. **The swelling was hard
and hot on his leg. Maybe he was getting an infection. The leg would probably need to be
amputated, even without the archaic shackle going between the bones. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he felt a heavy, warm weight on his arm. He looked
slowly, having to concentrate to still breath steadily. The hellhound lay there, facing
him. His eyes met her blank, shadowed orbs and for a brief moment, she paused an he held
his breath. She winced, baring her teeth. Carl had not even the energy to move, to fear.
He watched from his drunken, incohesive state.
They'd laid together before. They'd looked into each other's eyes and saw
something. Something deep. It went beyond biology, beyond instinct. It went deep beyond
the reproductive imperative that the Dark God believed in solely. Yes, it may have
resulted from such basic biological, chemical things, but now it had a life all its own.**
It had evolved and matured, much like the world around this ancient, forgotten prison, into
something much more profound than any chemical reaction could make it. But even if it was
only an elemental reaction, a trick and interpretation of hormones, it was worth it to
believe that it could be a beautiful thing and that it would somehow prevail over all. Where Carol had been killed and resurrected, fossilized inside the Hellhound Matron, it was
now her mate's turn. There was no telling how, there was no ancient momentum. The Dark
One had nothing to do with this, he was powerless as this began to occur, as the power
rose.
The hellhound looked at the human and through all her conflicting instincts she saw
clearing for a moment, and her heart sunk, her stomach churned. Something was gathering on
the far horizons of her consciousness, something she had not felt for aeons, for ages,
something she was fueled by but had never truly experienced herself. Looking into Carl's fading eyes, deep in the dark, through her twisted, shadowy senses, her
blurry eyesight... Smelling his scent, the scent which was how she formed a fuller picture
of him in the dark. Hearing and feeling his ponderous, struggling breath, to... To feel
his fading life-force and consciousness, to KNOW that if he fell to sleep he would never
again wake up.
She had always brought death but had never once held death in her paws, looked death in the
eyes, felt death really come for something... Something she loved. Fear, foreboding, dominating and belittling her existence. A terror that was older than
her and held a root at the very beginning of human existence. A horror that, whether
reasonable or unreasonable, instinctual or spiritual, whether based in the chemistry or the
soul, was so deep and profound that she felt like she sat at the bottom of the ocean and
looked up, to see all the seas of the world rushing in on her, whose edges could not be
scene, who could press how out of existence as easily and remorselessly as she'd killed
before.
Fear... Of being alone.
It was the true frightening possibility of being nothing and insignificant, fear of really
just being a complex series of chemical reactions and biological impulses.[c]
She would save Carl.
She had to. She could not let herself just watch him die in her paws.
Through the debilitating fear she felt a new purpose, and new drive, as she stood slowly on
her four paws and pressed over the frail, broken human, whose broken body, like a crushed
flower, held desperately onto life but had no hope.
The hellhound Matron, through the bones of Carol, had come to a new plane in its mental
existence. This enlightenment, that somehow made her profound darkness deeper but brought
her to a higher level of thought.
The beast looked down at the human and did not know what to do, but knew what had to
happen. She had to save him, she had to... She had to kill him to save him. She had to
kill his human body and make it into a new hellhound, like had been done with Carol. He was so very near to dead that she could smell death moving in. She pressed her strong,
blocky muzzle to his neck and spread her black lips; her teeth, long and sharp and holding
the deaths of countless people on them.
She kissed his neck, she licked it with her warm, wide tongue.[d] It was hot and soft, she
could taste the salt of his sweat, something that she once savored but now made her stomach
churn.
She turned up his chin and licked up his face, the purely canine affection the best
approximation that she could give him, but he was still fading out. She pressed her body down on him, warm and smoothly-furred, her belly, heavy with the yet-
lifeless pups, spread over his hips.
Still dying.
She needed to try something, something to bring him hope. She knew that he could never
love her, but... Maybe she could make him see something of his mate in her? [e] Would that
make him despair even more, or give him hope?
Still, she needed to. She dug deep. Human affection... Some symbol.
She closed her mouth, she whined lowly. She leaned down, lips still closed. She pressed
them to his quivering, shaky lips, and she felt him stir some, his arms twitch, his leg
clench. She felt him tense up with pain, and felt him begin to tighten his grip on life a
little, just for an imaginary glimmer of hope.
She kissed him. The hellhound kissed the human, and she tilted her head to the side just a
little, perhaps an artifact of Carol's memory. She could feel his form shaking weakly with
fever, and she began to shake just as bad in her apprehension. [f]His fading mind, she had
to help him.
Her heavy body on him, she began to whine, to grind against his chest, to try and hold him
tight. She felt the fear pressing in on her mind and it made her act more frantically, and
for every little bit more that he slipped, the fear loomed that much higher. She was desperate, she needed to save him, somehow. With love. But what could love do?
And love, this... thing, how would it save him? This feeling that grew and strangled her
cold, murderous heart and her very reason and instinct. She didn't understand how she
could make this happen at all.
She pressed her head down to his, the side of hers resting on his soft cheek. She looked
in the same direction as him, and she felt how his cheek was soft, if slightly roughly-
haired, and how her cheek was hard and held under it only strong muscle and bone. She hoped inside of her, a hope that was deeper than any of her past anticipation of the
thrill of killing, or birthing, or mating. She hoped that she had the willpower to do this
when all her instincts worked against her and her waking consciousness was fighting against
the very principle.
She felt Carl stir under her, and felt a connection bridge between them. Something, thin,
a spark, something that let her consciousness leak into him. It flooded into him, slowly,
as he writhed in pain. It overrode every last little bit of disgust and hate, made them
mix into a perverted spiteful, heartrending lust, and at the same time caused a great
feeling of familiarity.
The knowledge, the ancient burden of knowing that Carol had to feel in the beginning of her
trials, now rushed into Carl's mind, filling the void where his life leaked out, easily
taking over and mixing with his mind, which was made pliable by the claws of death. First,
there was only raw memories, memories from milleniums ago when there was just he and his
mate. The two hounds had lived, they had loved, in the lush, warm forest, for what seemed
like a time that was cut all too short. Banished, by the humans with their wicked obsidian
tools and their shamans and fell devices. Banished, them and their master, down into this
deep hole in the ground and never, ever let to see the sunlight.
There was hate, an insurmountable amount of hate that trickled through Carl's waking mind.
It was a soft, black drip that began to fill in and saturate all his thoughts. This
intense hate as he experienced it, filled him and overrode every other emotion, as he sat
for ages in the dank tunnels here, in the nothing, in the black, and all that was light and
love faded out from his life like a dying candle.
Yes, all the wonderful things, all the beauties of life. He had loved and married and met
a beautiful woman. That form, her lovely curves, they inspired a sudden spite that
corrupted his imagine, the last of the very few memorials of Carol. What was a Carol, any
how? He couldn't summon her image forward, but could only bring hate and disgust. He turned his mind to other things. He felt numb in his body, numb and weak and
disgusting, bloody and dying. He was muted and deafened here as he could hardly hear,
could not smell, could see only a shadow in the blackness. The shadow? It was the other
hound. It was Carol, no, it was the Matron. It was his mate. It was who he'd been reborn
through so many times, here in the dark. It was his all and it comforted his panicking,
racing mind and heart.
He tried to lift up his head to lick her but was too weak. She turned down to look at him
and in her hollow, hallow black eyes he saw something, an inkling of something he'd never
seen before. More than a cunning, or any sort of physical lust. He couldn't understand.
The hellhound couldn't understand. No, Carl, no, the hound, he couldn't understand as he
saw this gleam.
Why was she laying on him? It was comforting. No, pain. He knew he was hurt, his leg, it
felt so foreign, but he was hurt and that's why. Maybe something terrible had happened.
No, something terrible had happened! Carol, she was wrenched away from him, made from her
frail, weak, useless, ugly human form into the sleek, efficient, black-furred killer that
was now laying on him. How could that be terrible? That was the most wonderful thing
ever.
And while he fought with himself, time slipped by. The matron looked down at the
struggling human, and reached down to lick his sweat-salted lips. She was gazing at him,
intrigued by the change, and when he licked back, she fully understood the gesture. Yes,
that link... That bond between them. No longer was the hound just forcing herself to
believe that this was her mate, but... The idea was becoming steadier and more acceptable,
less reviling to her emotions.
But Carl fought and fought. He gasped, but could only whisper. When from his trance he
came to, from the edge of death, riding in on the tide of memories and instincts, his view
suddenly changed. So much time had passed. He looked from far away at the hound atop him
and weakly lifted an arm to her taught shoulder, and stroked through her short, dense fur.
He spoke to her as he felt this swelling bond, instincts all falling into place with the
hound. Where her form was once terrifying, her body was now pleasing. He no longer saw
her as the grave of Carol, but as the Hellhound, as his true mate. Carol was nothing more
to him. NO. He couldn't let go. Carol was everything... Carol... Carol was still in
there. Carol was gone but she was still in there. She didn't eat him after all. That
was... Wait.
His hand brushed over her bulging stomach, taught with the still forms of the puppies. No.
That was... Puppies? He was confused, not sure how to react. If he was here, the Matron
was atop him... He felt the other hound, away somewhere else, deep in the Labyrinth. How
could there be more?
Because he was meant to be the sacrifice! No, what sacrifice? The hound part of him knew
only very little of the ritual and couldn't quite comprehend the mixed-in thoughts of the
human's. But all that Carl could agree with himself on, is that the Matron was there, and
pregnant with the still litter.
He looked up in awe and beheld her beautiful form for the time he could. She lifted her
chest off of his just a little, to look the human in the eye. She was sure of what she had
to do now, though it rebelled against everything in her... She felt the swiftness of
energy, changing energy, envelope the human's body.
The conception wasn't over yet. No, she knew, it couldn't be over.
Almost at that thought, her sense began to dull down. The world around her failed away as
the input in her mind felt strange. It was as if she felt them draining into his mind, her
ancient knowledge and hate and anger fading away. She could still recall it but could not
actively feel it. It was like she was locked out of the understanding of her senses and
her past, focusing almost entirely on her vision.
And then it was, as if to replace the senses lost, she felt her mind's reason blossom more
than it ever had before, even upon her first introduction to Carol's broadened psych. The
petals of thought opened up before her very thought and and overwhelming understanding took
her, and left her at awe.
This was the waking human mind, exchanged from Carl to the hellhound, and she opened her
eyes as if for the first time, and all her senses took in vast amounts of information.
Everything was new to her, and a hunger for knowledge, an unknown pliability, overswept her
whole faculty.
She looked down at the struggling Carl, and knew now, that he was wrestling with
the hound mind, trying to sort himself out, really, just finding the way that it would best
assimilate him. There was a pang of sadness and guilt in her now, as she knew that she was
melting away his very identity. She wasn't directly killing him, devouring him like the
Dark One intended, but she was taking his life in another way. She was ending his human
life, forever, like she had ended Carol's. Perhaps, she thought, they would still be
together in a way, through the parallelism of their ends.
She watched him, his writhing, with an adoration befitting a mother, but also with a deep,
grim pride. Here, they were breaking the cycle of death for life with the entrance of the
new conception. It was her and this human and the strange new emotion with which he held
his mate that made it possible. Carol and Carl taught the Matron how to love, and that
meant the dawning of a new age for their species.
Her attention was bought by the cessation of the man's struggling. He had survived and
assimilated the hound mind and she was thrilled. She rose off of his injured body as she
heard him try to scent the air and strain his ears for movement, as he tried to growl and
failed. She craddled him to her chest almost like a puppy as he whimpered, isolated in the
foreign flesh. He would be her mate, he was well on the way to being a hound. Her heart
swelled so that she felt the hot anticipation of their first breeding, which would seal him
as the beast.
He anticipated this as well, as she could feel from the change in his heart rate, the rise
he was getting. She would smile if she could, as, with her reasoning mind, she felt there
would be no shame. It was imminent that he would be her mate, so why should there be a
delay? Muted was the instinctive hatred of his human form, as she beheld him, replaced
with a little pitiful admiration.
She licked him, tasting his sweat-salted flesh, as he writhed, confused by the weakness of
his form. He pressed his hands into her fur, and she rubbed against him with her chest.
She could feel his excitement, as she teased her helpless mate through the tatters of his
trousers.
She only had to back off of him, leaving a single heavy paw on his chest. She took her
teeth and rent away the final entrapments of civilization from his body, and, though her
opinion of his fragile masculinity was low, she couldn't help but find joy and arousal in
his helplessness.
This was almost better than scaring humans. She was in power, fully, no longer under the
thumb of the Dark One. She was even in power over her mate, as she placed her paws on
either side of his head as he whimpered, and she claimed him.
As she took him, and chose him now in body as she had chosen him with the mind earlier, she
felt herself slipping back into ferality. The clarity did not escape her, but her
instincts, again surfaced, bubbling. They were different, now, not so violent, so hateful.
Cruel and efficient, but flexible. She ruled them yet.
And as that change took her, she noticed a change begin to overtake her mate, as his body
began to warp, to grow. His hands on her rolling shoulders felt heavier and larger, the
feeling of his fingers digging in recessed, and claws grew. His body swelled up under her,
his chest peaking under her. His torso grew rounder, as she felt the strong muscles begin
to turbidly roll under his skin. His legs cracked audibly and echoed in the stone room,
even over the sound of their bestial panting. She shivered and whined as she felt his
maleness begin to change shape within her, fur spreading up from where his feet gnarled
into paws tipped in gruesome claws. He clung to her as his body grew larger, stronger,
more animal until he was larger and more powerful than her, his tightly-coiled, sinewous
muscles bunched up in tension. His neck thickened as the short black fur reached his heavy
arched chest, and he turned his head up as it began to push out into a thick, blocky,
strong muzzle with a gruesome whimper.
The spines on his canid member grew out into her folds, claiming her. Thus, he chose her
as his physical change finished, as his whimper turned into a loud howl alongside hers and
coiled together to echo in the chamber.
She collapsed on top of him, her muzzled in his neck, her nose full of his musk. A true
male musk that made her giddy and feel like a pup. It awoke a feeling deep in her that had
been buried for aeons. Something that even Caroline had not brought with her in her
deepest of loves for Carl.
As he turned his new ebon eyes up to her, she caught her breath in a quivering gasp. Those eyes were familiar. They knew her.
And in her mind she recalled the memories of daylight, of love, of youth...
And a male hound who was not banished alongside her, who did not fall under the Dark One's
sway, who had been trying to come back to her lifetime after lifetime, to break the circle
of incestuous birth and death.