# An Inner Impulse Rent the Veil: Movement One

Author: Aux Chiens
Tags: Abdomen, Body Horror, Cerci, Griffinfly, Horror, Human, Insect, M/M, Male, Meganeura, Skin ripping, Transformation, Zoophilia, blood, chitin, dragonfly, gross, prehistoric

An Inner Impulse
Rent the VeilMovement One
             We lead two lives, and the half
of our soul is madness, and half heaven is lit by a black sun. I say I am a
man, but who is the other that hides in me?"_________ 
Arthur
Machen, Holy Terrors

            The atheist will tell you
there is no god, the materialist will tell you there is nothing more than what
can be observed.
            They are both wrong - but no
fault of their own, they do not consciously know why.
            Not yet.
            But it is not hard to guess,
though- the forest will do that for you.
            The forest is sufficient unto
itself.
            In the forest you find
yourself, up in the Appalachians with its pines that spread out to nigh-blind
the eye, out West in the Rockies too, out far into California with the
redwoods, hug them, clutch them, these trees, you will find yourself, you will
be who you want to be, for the Earth birthed you but it fathered you also, it
is both genders and it is brutal, the worst aspects of male and female,
abusive, eugenic, you will die being beaten relentlessly by your Fathermother
and you will cry out its name in love and lust even as it kills you.
            Find yourself - lose yourself.
            Every race, on every
continent, came out of the forest and saw the Sun and worshipped it: they had
grown miserable in the all-day shade, sleepless from the gleam-eyes of the
stalking creatures in the canopies that had no name, and then out came the Sun
with its light and its banishment of shadows and they worshipped it, no matter
where, you fell to your knees, naked ape, ugly primate, you worshipped the
Skyfire, that humdrum star that Sagan sometimes frowned, sometimes smiled at.
            Drake Le Carde was a part of
that forest. 
            Even in the pavement plains
and concrete debauchery of this region of the country there is still nature and
there are still dark thoughts that lurk in dark minds - Central Florida,
history-haunted, still the traditional South, slaves died down here, their brown-skinned
bodies contorted, like beautiful Daphne in faraway myth, into the twist-trunk
cypress, the spindly-tentacle live oaks.
            Drake - what an awful name, awful because it was appropriate,
terrifyingly appropriate, for what had happed to him. And Le Carde - that disgusting French flourish that lingered in the air
like the mist from virgin rivers that his ancestors who joined Champlain first
saw, far to the north, an unforgotten time.
            But this was foolishness - the
fancy of poets, and a man of science had no need to employ a bard.
            Drake was a man, just a man, fit
and lithe from years of his enthusiasm for marathons and running, but as
revealed by his salt-and-pepper beard he was an old man by many, if not all,
stretches of the word - barely. This
was a piece of trivia hidden from anyone who saw him...his companions with him
knew, but they were a precious, an elite, just how barely he was - a man.
            They were riding in his SUV, a
newish Ford Explorer - he and three others, graduate students of his, because
in the real world, the seen world of
what one knows, one expects, he was a professor of Paleobiology at the University
of Florida, Gainesville, a Southern city, it used to be segregated, you know. 
            It sickened him - America, the
world sickened him but the South sickened him especially so.
            In the real world - the world
that one sees - he was divorced, from
a woman who was a scientist herself, a cardiac researcher who knew the
intricacies of all human hearts except, it seemed, her own. They had no
children - between the two of them.
            He was respected and awarded
and he was called upon nationally, at times internationally, in the study of
the buzzing and flying and creeping things that lived on the surface of the
Earth in literally antediluvian ages - his specialty, his passion, some said
rightly his obsession, was the
crowning glory of the prehistoric insects, Odonatoptera...the Griffinflies, with
their lithe, beautiful, near-perfect existence of morphology and reproduction.
            Griffinflies went extinct
millions of years ago - no need to bore with how many millions - but ah, that is false, utterly false, for they,
as humans, as every animal, merely evolved,
and not into dragonflies as so goes the narrative, for that is partially, but
not entirely true.
            Griffinflies - like dragonflies, named for majestic mythical
beasts. Griffinflies had escaped man's notice because they had evolved in
strict, hidden isolation into something approaching that mythic ideal -
something, perhaps, even divine.
            And that was terrible wasn't
it? For him to think of anything, as a scientist, to be godly, as supernatural!

            But they did not know - what
he knew.
            He was a scientist and he,
once, was an atheist and a materialist but that was, by his own retrospective
admittance, an extreme folly - a scientist should be agnostic to all things, to
even the weirdest and the strangest, because the world is weird and strange,
and reality is mere consensus amongst
fragile human psyches.
            He knew this now - he, and the
three others with him.
            His graduate students were his
family, outside of the family he never had and outside of the family they,
themselves, either had lost or had wished to forget: Rick, brown hair to his
shoulders, burly, strong, tastefully hirsute, only twenty-two but already
overwhelmingly a man; Chase, the
quiet one, cleanshaven but rugged and built and sturdy, from his Downeaster
Yankee blood, twenty-three, his pale skin eternally draped in his favorite
hoodie, napping softly; Jason, his favorite although he was not supposed to
have one, the eldest at twenty-six, casting to the world a perpetually soulful
gaze which he now directed out the window, tall and fully bearded, though he
was outwardly confident his very soul, Drake knew, struggled mightily for the
lost precepts of the religion that he had reluctantly left behind...
            There could have been others,
Drake thought, but only the four of them, himself included, remained.        There were so many excellent possible
additions that never came to pass - Drake remembered one of them, Andrew, of a
storied family from both of the Virginias, who had dazzled the department with
his work ethic and his knowledge and gotten accepted, fully funded, but his
vocation to academe was not as serious as his vocation to his husband and to
his brother, he had a family already, and the relationship he and Drake shared
was strictly professional.
                He, Andrew, would have been
magnificent - but some are not ready, unprepared to cast off what they had in
this world and see how it truly was with cleansed eyes. Drake was leaving the
department and Andrew would be a star pupil for someone else.
                The four of them had passed
most of this car ride from Gainesville to their destination, Ocala National
Forest, in quiet, respectful silence - there was a tension, an excitement
between them that eluded mere description or words, they were all waiting and
couldn't hardly wait. 
                Drake's stomach - his
ailment, ultimate proof of his reality, the obscene blessing to his terrified
and terrifying worldview, what he saw and felt - was full, it was always full,
and lately noticeably bloated besides...it made his tight, lithe physique look
off, but clothes easily, thankfully, covered it.
                He shifted in his seat,
eyes on the road, giving away nothing - for most of this week, part of the
last, and tonight very keenly, it was uncomfortably
full. 
                The time, he realized,
would be soon. The pile of papers, wrapped tastefully in binders, was proof of
that - as much as Drake himself was.
                At last they arrived at
their chosen campsite and it was dark already so Drake prepared a campfire. His
graduate students - Rick, Chase, Jason - after stretching from the long car
ride, did all the remainder of the work, in relative silence, with some brief
worded instructions to one another, they set up the pair of the tents, brought
out the food, arranged the sleeping bags.
                Drake was not dressed for
the weather and for June in Florida he looked very odd indeed - a track jacket
with the colors and logo of the Canadian national soccer team, and nylon
jogging pants to near-match - and none of the others seemed really concerned
with the weather either, based on their attire: Jason wore jeans and a thick
cotton t-shirt; Chase in, of course, his favorite hoodie, plain black with Hollister stitched across the front.
Only Rick was dressed for hiking - and indeed, for Florida in the summer.
                The campsite itself was
highly secluded, and excellently private - this time of year, early summer, it
was still bursting with hallucinogenic viridescence, a green so rich and pure
that it could scarcely to be believed it was Earthly at all, but a piece, however
small, of Eden itself. 
                In the daylight - now it
was night and the forest was black, blacker than the sky, choked with palmettos
that were in turn dwarfed by towering long-leaf pines and decades-old oaks. 
                Just beyond the trees,
visible through them in fact by a small footpath, was a large lake - it had a
name and Drake knew it well, but his mind was elsewhere...
                There was a mild
conversation between Chase and Rick as they worked, a joke between them, about
being extra careful, and not getting lost - there was a news story about a man
who had disappeared without a trace in the North Carolina mountains, although
they found his Jeep and his discarded clothes, and although it was a tragedy
Rick and Chase had turned it into a joke. 
                Drake frowned at their
gallows humor, and their chuckles ceased into embarrassed smiles.
                Jason had stayed close by
him, clingy in a way Drake could not decide whether he liked or disliked, those
soulful, gem-like brown eyes, now in the firelight a pair of glimmering
citrines, would glance at him, and twice his lips parted as though he was about
to ask a question, the question they both knew he wanted to ask...but he never
did.
                When he turned away to
retrieve something Drake felt his heart clench in his chest - a suppressed feeling
that threatened to burst at any moment, forbidden, labyrinthine and complex
only because it had been allowed to fester for so long.
                Out came the bear-proof
canisters with that evening's meal - some chips, an apple for Drake so he could
get his required sugar, washed down with water in brightly-colored Camelbaks,
something light, this was ostensibly an overnight stay and it was late already,
but it seemed perfunctory, even fake, the motions that one goes through, the
world could be ending tomorrow and you are still planning for next week.
                It was not lost on Drake,
who scanned the area - so private, so secluded amidst the forest - enrobed and
enshrined, they seemed to be, in their flattened and settled place by the
leering shadows...he felt an uncomfortable, wistful sadness. 
                In the distance there was a
wild flash of heat-lightning - all around them was the infinite symphony of the
night-insects. Drake strained his ears, pacing around the campsite...one of them
should have been singing by now. One of them - a special one. Where was he?
                ...he. He did not have a name but he was certain his existence was,
for Drake, a truth, a truth that, like religion, must be revealed but never
owned, never possessed, as much as he,
nameless he, possessed him.
                It was now night, the dusk
was full and ripe as a black-splattered fruit that fell to Earth - the silence
was unbearable, and he heard his stomach make a noise, faint but perceptible...a
threat, at first, but as Drake paused, away from the others, to consider it -
perhaps, instead, it was a promise.
                He paced back to the
campfire, calling ahead:
                "Alright fellas, let's
have a talk."
                Chase and Rick, sitting
together, sharing a bag of chips and chatting in a low voice, snapped their
heads at attention to him - from the shadows next the car, with the same
doleful stare, appeared Jason.
                "Hey Professor,"
Chase said cheerfully. "You been, uh - you been real quiet this whole
trip."
                "Yeah sorry I - slept
on the way here," Rick added. "Up late getting all the notes you
needed."
                "I read them this
morning - they were good." Drake sighed. "I know I've seemed -
preoccupied this time, and I apologize for that. I thank you - all three--"
He shot a glance at Jason, who nodded slightly. "--for your patience. It
hasn't been easy doing...what we've done."
                "It's been fun,"
Rick answered - before conceding with a half-shrug: "For the most
part."
                "The only thing,
uh--" Chase stopped. "I can be honest, right?"
                "Absolutely,
Chase," Drake replied, trying to smile - his stomach cramped and he
expertly suppressed whatever pain it could have brought to his face. "Ab -
solutely."
                "Well um..." Chase
set the bag of chips down next to him. "It's just been a - it hasn't been
easy working in secret like we do."
                "And I understand
that," Drake said with another nod.
                "But we're almost
done, right?" asked Rick, leaning forward some. "We can publish this
soon? So you said you were retiring..."
                A long, uncomfortable
silence proceeded Rick's question - Drake stared at him, his student, his
pupil, nearly a son to him, before lifting his eyes above him, into the
woods...he strained his ears once more, but could not hear what he needed to...
                He shut his eyes. 
                "Fellas - I don't know
how to tell you this - but we can't publish it - we can't go public."
                Chase's mouth fell open in
shock. "Pro - Professor, you can't--!"
                Rick squinted in disbelief.
"Sir, come on you can't be
serious! After all the work - the pain--"
                Drake could hear the
disappointment in their voices - he nearly lost his nerve. 
                But then Jason spoke up:
"If he says we can't go public, we can't go public, that's just how it
is." 
                The two younger students
looked up to their older companion in surprise - Jason had been always been
taciturn but lately he had barely spoken a word, it seemed like it had been a
full month before either of them had heard his voice.
                At Jason's words Drake felt
the same tightness in his chest, as before, but dismissed it - continuing ahead
with the bad news.
                "Listen - fellas,
listen. I know you're disappointed, I know - I know that's not what you wanted
to hear. But--" He hesitated. "There are very - very good reasons we
cannot go public - ever."
                "Ever?" Rick
repeated.
                "No - you see--"
He took a deep breath - four decades of teaching, studying, research, papers,
presentations, awards...they could not aid him now, this was the most difficult
thing, however improbably, he had ever had to face. When I approached you - last
year and told you that there was a species of Meganeura still living, still out here in this particular region of
Florida, and I brought back wing samples that had been shed - and so on - but
the reason I kept it to my graduate students, not to my department not - to my
superiors or - scientific journals or anything
of that nature..." He paused - all three pairs of eyes were on him,
intent. "Was because that, amongst them, there is - a king, an elder,
alpha, whatever you wish to call it - I think we all agreed amongst ourselves
the nomenclature was king...and this - king - forcefully uh - mated with
me."
                His students nodded - it
was still a repellent, even incredible story, but they had heard it before, and
they knew, each of them, that it was true. His voice was calm, and sometimes it
broke off and he would have to start again, as though reality itself impinged
on him trying to speak.
                "And this species -
has spermatozoa that is highly mutagenic to human DNA - which, if you'd had
suggested such a thing to me two years ago, I would laughed you out of my
office - that's fiction, comic books, that's not--" The absolute irony of
what he was about to say hit him, hard, and sighed as he finished the sentence:
"--science."
                Again his students nodded -
Jason glanced away, shifting where he stood, as if something had suddenly made
him uncomfortable. 
                "But--" Drake began
again slowly. "It's true. We all saw it - we all agreed to study ourselves
with different doses of the semen collected from male specimens - our trips out
here - based on the first...dose..."
He frowned at his own word. "Given to me. Rick was the control, who
received no dose..." Rick nodded at the mention of his name, and Drake moved
to the other two in succession as he continued: "...followed by Chase, and
then Jason, who received progressively higher doses." He cleared his
throat. "Inserted anally."
                Chase gave a mirthless
sniff, and a half-smile - Jason folded his arms, eyes drifting into the fire
and yet somewhere beyond it.
                He paused yet again, the
crackle of the campfire and the sound of the crickets, without the loudest
trilling voice that should have been amongst them, seemed to become louder in
Drake's ears - the eyes of his students did not waver and it gave him a needed
ounce of strength to continue.
                "We tracked - what
happened to our bodies - which proved for some of you an extra challenge
because of privacy, I understand - and I understand the fear--" At the very
word his own fear chilled him, a spare moment that he powered through with a
shaky sigh. "--that we, as a group, had to deal with - after all they are
our own bodies, and we were lucky, very lucky, that none of us were sick or
injured and required to be looked at by a doctor..." He allowed himself a
self-effacing chuckle. "In my - push to do this, that was an oversight I
had overlooked."
                Now he moistened his lips,
and swallowed hard.
                "What I did - I know,
was highly unethical. It ran contrary to everything I have been taught and
surely everything that was taught to you - in some cases taught to you by me. To do this in secret - to -
willingly obfuscate findings from the university to advance our own personal
agenda and interests..." He shook his head. "It's a scandal waiting to
happen."
                "We knew that,"
Rick offered quietly. "We knew that going in."
                "You told us right
from the get-go this would be dangerous, Professor," Chase said - he
shrugged. "We...we don't care. Meganeura
lecardii has to be protected--"
                "I know," Drake
cut him off, "I know. We - have discussed - at length my fears, our fears, about what would happened if
they discovered a - Lazarus taxon in this part of Florida..." He lifted his
arms as if to embrace the whole forest, before dropping them down to his sides.
"One that is very, very dangerous to human bodies in an - extraordinary
-and unconventional ways." Again he shook his head, slowly this time.
"If - it was ever found out - that there was an insect species capable of
mutating humans..." His voice trailed off again.
                "The forest would be
destroyed to destroy it," Jason said flatly. 
                Rick and Chase made noises
of agreement. 
                "That's right,"
Drake near-whispered - he sighed harshly.
                "But - Professor, not
to be rude, but - again, we all know
that. We're all from Florida and we're all - we all agreed with you, to protect
this place and - the species that was in it - all of them, not just the
insects." He frowned, unable to hide his annoyance. "Why can't we go public now? We've found ways to cure the
mutagen, that's the whole reason--"
                "No," Drake said,
lifting up his hand. "Rick - no. We can't."
                "But why?" Rick
pressed.
                Drake felt his face flush -
he hated it when it happened, he was so used to being able to hide his emotions
behind a professional pokerface, even amongst those he trusted it...but he could
not battle his own circulatory system betraying him with an involuntary
reaction to stress.
                "I..." He took
several breaths - breaths he needed for the dire revelation he was about to
bring them. "I have discovered the mutagen is progressive."
                It was as if all the whole
world had been swept away and there was only Drake, standing before the
campfire, Rick and Chase sitting together beneath him and Jason aloof by
himself - the Explorer, the canisters, a cooler, the trees around them - it was
as if nothing else existed in the world except that moment, made of glasses,
the slightest hint of anything would shatter it, for with Drake's words time
had stopped, the crickets had ceased, the stars did not twinkle.
                Some seconds passed like
this - tense, palpably tense, unbearably tense - Drake staring ahead, trying
not to falter, not like this, not tonight.
                At the end of this
interminable length came Chase's voice, stricken with uncharacteristic
timidity: "...h-how...how is it progressive?"
                Drake stared at him - his
mouth opened, then snapped shut, down on his teeth in a frustrated grit.
                "Listen, fellas..."
he said, trying to use the intimate, coded language they shared one last time.
"It's - it's better - it's better if I just show you."
                Without another word, and
after a profound, nigh-debilitating hesitation - he untied and took off his
shoes, unzipped his jacket, and doffed his pants, discarding them all behind
him. He came forward, so that they could see him, full in the firelight.
                A small gasp came from
Chase and Rick - Jason pursed his lips, revealing nothing.
                Standing before them, now
naked, was Drake - their professor, their advisor, their secondary, sometimes
primary father-figure, a handsome man with a cultivated salt-and-pepper beard,
close-cropped silvery hair, in his early sixties but fit and lithe for his age,
lean muscle, having spent a lifetime taking great care of his body...except for
his belly, a new and worrisome addition, which was distended, oddly,
grotesquely, and where the skin had turned pale, sickly-looking crisscrossed
with veins that, in the campfire, were coloured a diseased green-purple,
bulging up from the skin.  
                Starting from his knees
down, where should have been human skin, flesh, was armored, segmented, bright-glimmering
emerald hard surface, terminating in sharpened toe-claws, two in the front, one
out of the heel - at the knee, where these two halves were improbably joined,
it seemed that whatever hideous disease had turned his extremities like that
was spreading - progressively - but
unevenly, right and left. His penis, uncircumcised, hung limp, disgustingly
hollow-looking, the urethra unnaturally wide and open, the veins seeming
altogether stretched and hoary as though exhausted from pumping blood - his
scrotum was no better, a mass of floppy flesh that looked as though it had been
subject to some great expansion and then retraction, the skin losing its
elasticity in the process. Across his back, a pair of infected-looking streaks,
like a sunburn that had not healed correctly, peeling skin with gangrene
underneath. From his rear - a tight, firm, fit ass marred by innumerable raised
welts and scars - protruded from the cleft in his ass a poking-out of a whitish
fleshy tube, as though his rectum had prolapsed and then somehow underwent a petrifaction
or necrosis.
                Drake let his students take
the sight of him in - him, who they had respected, learned from, even loved,
now this nauseating, abominable half-monster, a walking disease.
He took a step forward, his feet-claws touching the ground and sending tingles
of ineffable sensation to his brain - vibrations, bare buzzes of inchoate
electromagnetism that filled his head with dizzying visions hallucinogenic
interruptions of sight and perception...he stopped so that his head could clear
again.
                "How...?" Rick
began, but stopping, as if unsure how to finish.
                "Is - is - is this--" Chase stammered. "The
end - the end result--?"
                "Not likely,"
Drake murmured. "I feel - which
is to say I can only hypothesize. If - if you - boys did, what I did, then -
no, it is not the final stage. A secondary, a--" His face became serene, a
need to own the term that he had given himself - barely a man, instead, something in between: "A pupal
stage."
                Again Chase stammered:
"What in the - the - the fuck--?"
                "Let me explain, Drake
interrupted, his voice still low, "from the beginning." 
                This was how it all began -
this was what had led them here, tonight. They had kept inside themselves,
internalized, never telling anyone except each other, what bound them first as
family - brothers.
                One year ago, near exactly,
Drake had been let known by a colleague at Florida State University that the
rumor had been for many years that dragonflies of strange shape and unusual
size could be seen and spotted in what was called Farles Prairie, next to
Farles Lake - where they were now, Drake realized, having forgotten the name in
his agitation. The colleague had been surprised Drake had no knowledge of this,
but then again he was not native to Florida - indeed, being from Canada, not
even American - and it was just a rumor, never substantiated, a local urban
legend.
                Drake was dubious, not to
say actually skeptical, as a scientist should be of exaggerated claims - like
the legend that goes into the fish that a countryboy catches - but he was
exhausted from the end of the semester, and expected to attend a conference in
Denver that he was dreading, so he instead took up the colleague's challenge to
find this insect, with a summer sabbatical to go along with it.
                When Drake had arrived at
Farles Lake, which during the unbearably hot summer months is only inhabited by
the curious hiker or the occasional fisherman, he was, however, astonished -
the rumors were true.      
                Although in tiny numbers -
tiny enough to escape detection from the average person who did not know what
he was looking for - there were still several healthy and collectable specimens
of what, based on the primitive wing structure, was undoubtedly a Meganisoptera, one that rivaled, if not
surpassed, the famous size of the Meganeura,
one of the largest insects that ever lived...Drake could scarcely believe his
luck, for such a find would revolutionize the current thought on the evolution
of insects. They would zoom, like birds, over the surface of the lake, milky
and drowsy as it reflected the clouds and sky above it - they were all a
beautiful shining green, a gemtone, an emerald, a peridot, an arrow shot from
grassblade to grassblade.
                It was as though Drake was
in South Africa again, as an exchange student forty years ago, doing field work
for the very first time - discovering that there was something new, some old
lifeform that had been ignored by so many for so long, a new species to be
discovered and described...it made him feel young again, like the entire world
was new.
                But - Drake added - he had
little time to be dazzled. With his camera he took some key shots of the
creatures, and afterwards he noticed some shed wings by the shore, and
carefully, for they were very delicate, collected them to be cataloged back at
UF.
                He kept the discovery,
however, and all the physical and photographic evidence to himself, slyly
telling his friend at FSU that he had been unable to find the specimen as
described - he was certainly not about to be outclassed in his field, and
especially not his own specialty - that, it turned out, it was probably just a
rumor, the excited tale of a Cracker pioneer unused to the freakishness of the
Florida subtropics. 
                It was nighttime - as it
was now - when he came back to his car after spending another day after this
hiking and exploring, trying to clear his head from a particularly fretful and
busy semester...he was alone, the campsite where he was at largely deserted, it
being a very late hour. As he came to his car he heard a sound from the woods,
something he had never heard before, a long, lonesome trill, a high buzz that
contained within it a musical quality, a pure, dulcet tone that had no parallel
in anything Drake had yet heard before.
                He was hypnotized by it -
it was such a puerile, ridiculous word, and yet he was, that's the only way to
describe it, incapable of controlling his own faculties, of denying himself
from going further, down the footpath, to the lake that was rapt in a
reflection of a full, wan Moon.
                The source of the sound -
which was hard to describe because none of the other three had ever heard it,
but was rather like the chirp of a cricket, but longer, more melodic, acting on
some deep auditory response in the brain's temporal lobe - he could not
determine, not at first. But then, in the midst of some trees, he could hear
it, he could hear it louder, and then louder still, until - as Drake near - it
became almost deafening, hurtful to his head, the unending noise that he loved
and yet, at that moment, also loathed.
                And he cried out - aghast.
                There, lit by the
moonlight, was a dragonfly - a griffinfly - but enormous, gigantic, and
standing, upright, like a man, on two clawed legs covered with the fine hooks
of its insect ancestry. Four gossamer-like wings fluttered quivering, on its
back - from behind it stretched a long, slender abdomen. 
                He had approached the
creature cautiously, in another world, it felt like, by the effects of - yes,
what was definitely the sound made by the rapid beating of the thing's wings,
and he crept, closer, closer, to get a better view, a better look:
                The thing's face was very
vaguely humanoid, it was not wholly insect, it lacked the aspect of what one
may call the uncanny valley, the
startling inhumanoid way that insect
heads are designed to a mammal so used in his collective evolution to studying
faces for reaction and body language...
                ...he, Drake, was unafraid. 
                But he should have been.
                Without warning, the tone
ceased - the creature's wings ceased their thrumming trance.
                It raised its arms, great
clawed things that glinted in the moonlight - raised its arms and kicked its
legs back and leapt at him - in two, three bounds the things was upon him,
using those claws to thrash at him, tear and shred his clothes.
                Here Drake paused the
story, the review that they all probably needed, so deep in their own project
that they may very well have forgotten what their reasons for doing it were.
                He paused - and he
remembered.
                He remembered the rush of
epinephrine - flight-or-fight, and he chose flight
- as he struggled in the thing's grasp, finally, somehow, the eternity of
seconds, grappling free.
                In his haste to crawl away
he had neglected - but then, how would he have known? - to cover his ass, which
was naked and exposed to the air.
                The creature took
advantage: in a diving swoop, it struck, knocking him to the ground, its long
abdomen suddenly swelling from base to end and expelling a massive stream of
clear, near-luminiscent syrup-like substance - it reeked of burnt sugar, a
foulness mixed with the sweetness. 
                Its two arms clutched Drake
in an unyielding deathgrip, pinning him to the ground - though Drake could not
see it he knew what happen next, a moment of grim lucidity amidst his febrile
collapse of absolute panic: the thing's legs went into the air, giving room for
that abdomen, flung into the air, to move, curve, until, expert marksman, it
found Drake's rear.
                Drake screamed.
                He felt four needle-knife
stabbings into his asscheeks - the cerci to hold him in place...and then the
abdomen itself.
                It was cold, at first, but
not to the touch, for underneath the chitin was evidently something warming it,
so that it felt like a still-warm corpse - and it slid, roughly, between the
cleft, into his anus. 
                Drake's hole would not
yield - face down into the grass, still yelling as loud as he could for help,
face wet with tears in an excruciation that now bordered on the ecstatic, it
would not yield, it would not grow bigger for the invader, too large, utterly
too large, even as he felt a spurt of something into him, some ghoulish precum
for this evolved insect monster, Drake knew it, knew that his anal ring would
surely rupture, he would die here, he would die being...
                ...fucked.
                It was though a spell had
been broken.
                The pain was still there,
yes, the crushing discomfort of being so full of something so enormous, but it
was joined by something else, something fast-moving, darting, quickly, like a
dragonfly over a lake.
                Pleasure. 
                Rapturous, euphoric, joyous
pleasure - the thought of being mated
this way was transportive, it was everything, a moment he wanted to last for
eternity, so fully fucked, so completely dominated, made to taste the grass and
the dirt, relentless and ruthless.
                Something inside him was
changing - something inside him was rotting, then liquefying, and reforming,
his entire sexuality, his constructed consciousness, permanently infected and
dying, second by second, as a new one was being put in its place...
                ...he grunted - once, twice,
putting force behind his arms and hands as he dug into the grass, pushing into
the ground, pushing, pushing, so that the creature could fuck him deeper.
                He grit his teeth so hard
he felt as though they should break in his skull - the thing's abdomen,
pulsing, wobbling in the air, sunk another inch, then another, until Drake was
sure he would burst from it, that he would be ripped open by this insectoid sex
tool that was probing him. The cerci tore at his cheeks even deeper, drawing
blood, trickling down to the grass, where it splattered and pooled.
                But in that instant - and
every instant after that, in nights that would drive him wild in some desolate
hour when he would awake and his asshole would be hungry, starving, so
wretchedly empty and unfilled - he did not care.
                He wanted the creature to
kill him.
                He wanted the creature to
pump him full of sperm, to ruin his body with a slimy substance he could only
guess, he could only hope, was the end result of this display.
                He cried out in ecstasy
intermingled with a soul-murderingly intense pain, his anus, his lower stomach,
so full of the creature that was claiming him.
                And then it happened - the
creature began to beat its wings in a rhythm that ripped the air, a fanning
chill in the warm night, faster and faster, Drake was in a windtunnel, he was
in the sky though he was still on the ground, he could hear that sonorous tone
again, that insect noise of pure song--
                The fluid began to pump,
creature's abdomen squirming and thrusting, the floodgates thrown off, the dam
bursting, out from the its strained seminal vesicles and into Drake, perfectly
inside him, again - again - each complete pulse delivering more, sticky, slimy,
the burnt-sugar smell everywhere, his
body was so full he could smell his tainted insides, his stomach bloating,
further, too far, he would burst, but let
it be so, a perfect way to die, to be filled with the cum of a master
griffinfly...
                ...he exhaled. 
                The vision - the memory -
finished, and back he came to the campfire, to Rick, to Chase, to Jason.
                But then, too, there was
the vague recollection of what happened later that night, less vivid but still
gorgeous, having a belly so hideously engorged he looked nine months pregnant,
the sticky slime everywhere, the creature vanishing as if he had never been
there at all, back into the woods, back into the trees. 
                Then he had eaten of it -
of what the creature had given him. 
                He could press on his
belly, still swollen, and out of his ass would pour a precious trickle of the
sugary treat, the semen, the semen that he feasted on and loved, utterly
addicted and he would never know, never want to know, why. He had done that for
the rest of the following day, so full he was, as much as he hated himself he
did it anyway, over and over...until he realized that what he had not consumed,
he had absorbed.
                And then the changes began.
                First, his legs, the
skin  sloughing off to reveal the chitin
that had rapidly grown underneath...
                ...he moved the talons - for
that is what they were - of his left foot against the grass, trying to savor
the blurred vision that it caused, something to distract him, if fleetingly,
from the feeling of, now, impending doom - what Rick, Chase, and Jason all
needed to know. 
                Again he felt his face
reddening with something like shame - but naked already, monstrous already, he
was past caring. 
                "I kept - returning.
Seeking this - what I deduced was the King,
largest and strongest, because I - I was - unable to control my
desires..." He took in a shaky breath. "I - wanted him. The pain, the -
fullness - over, and over..."
                "You came back,"
Rick guessed. "And you - lied to
us."
                "I'm sorry,"
Drake blurted. "I'm - sorry to all of you."
                His eyes caught Chase's -
dark blue, a twinkle in the firelight - which turned from a glare to a look of
hurt: "Professor, you - you didn't have to hide that, after everything - especially after everything--"
                "I did it because I
was ashamed," Drake said to him. "It was--" He stopped, letting a
shiver run through him. "It was - the most wonderful feeling in the world.
Once I was made love to by him--"
Drake smiled, very much well in spite of himself. "The king, the - largest and best and most
evolved of his species, I found - nothing else would do." He motioned to
his bloated belly, and reached around to twiddle the prolapsed peeking through
his thin, shapely cheeks. "Despite these - because of these."
                Another silence befell the
four of them - Jason broke it:
                "But you told us that
no matter how ugly the species was, or what it did, it had to be
protected."
                "Yes," Drake
said, trying to get back his confidence. "Y-yes, I did say that."
Once more he hesitated - his nerve so close to being lost. "And it is - it
is a rather - ugly species..." He
sighed. "As much as I...have come to love it."
                He saw Rick blink several
times - his mouth fell agape, his eyes narrowed askance: "Just - just how ugly, other than - other than
what--"
                Chase looked displeased.
"There's something you're not telling us - and you promised there'd - that
there'd be no secrets...Professor."
                The last word was an
accusation - Drake tried not to wince, but the urge to overcame him a powerful
twinge inside his belly.
                There was no time now at
all.
                "I will - I will need
to show you, fellas," he said. "Follow - follow me down the trail
here - to the lake."
                "But why--?" Rick
asked.
                "You'll see,
fellas," Drake answered, the twinge in his stomach becoming a full spasm
that caused him to grunt in unexpected pain. "You'll - you'll see."
                Chase and Rick rose in
unison - Drake nodded to James who appeared with a bucket to douse the
campfire.
                "Bring - a
flashlight," Drake ordered, still looking at James. "They'll need to
see this as clear as - as they can."
                "Professor," Rick
spoke up. "Please, why can't you just--?"
                Drake held up a hand.
"I know. I should have been honest with you - in all things. But I..."
He seemed to consider the thought. "You need to see...what has happened to
me. And what - will happen, to me..."
                "Let's go," came
James' commanding voice. 
                Drake led the way, James
close behind him, gently pressing on his back as not to lose his footing - and
for another reason that he tried not let sadden him - onto a path that came out
onto Farles Lake, that, he knew, would sparkle magically with broken moonlight
in a cloudless sky. 
                From the corner of his eye
as he walked, he saw Rick grasp Chase's hand, and hold it there, as if to
comfort him - he smiled to himself, having brought them together watched them
grow closer, his heart briefly warmed...before a cramp seized his belly yet
again.
                He quickened his steps,
feet-claws raking the tread-down grass.
                He would have to hurry - it
was about, at last, to begin.

Source: https://sofurry.com/view/868140