Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Monstrum: Grub

   By WintermuteX wintermutex.stories@gmail.com
https://www.wintermutexstories.com/
Tags: Mg, bd, best, inc, magic, nc, ped, rape, reluc, viol

   Content: Rape, Monster Rape, Young Girls, Magic/Fantasy, Gore, Death,
Violence, Bondage, Incest, Pedophilia, Pregnancy



   ~*~

   Seri scratched her pencil idly on the paper as she sat on the stump. 
Her sketchpad lay on her knees, the event taking place in front of her
illustrated with meticulous detail: the tiny cocoon of a Grobule - a small,
grub-like creature - hung from the thick branch, just barely beginning to
twitch and pulse as the creature inside struggled to life.

   How fascinating nature was, she thought, leaning forward on the stump to
peer more closely at the cocoon.  All around her, the sounds of the forest
life buzzed in the darkness beyond the revealing light of the campfire. 
The chatter of night birds, the rustle of deer moving unseen in the
shadows, the buzzing of an uncountable variety of insects - it all blended
together into a wholesome rhythm that seemed to connect Seri to the forest
around her.  She loved nights like this one, where she didn't have to worry
about being on duty, didn't have to worry about the endless study and
tedious practice that was the life of a mage.  Just her and her sketchpad,
together with the thrumming of life all about her.

   The cocoon twisted more urgently, one sticky end fixed tightly to the
branch while the other writhed in the air.  A Grobule was only a few inches
long - the size of a hefty slug, perhaps - but their biology was
extraordinary.  There were 3 periods in their life when they molted,
transferring from their larval form to adolescence to adulthood
respectively.  Seri wasn't sure what form the Grobule would take.  There
was no way to tell just from the appearance of the cocoon.  She waited with
pencil poised, ready to fill in the rest of her sketch with the Grobule as
it hatched.

   Slowly, the cocoon began to split, a fine crack appearing in the
glistening fleshy surface.  Dozens of little curling legs squeezed out,
followed by the wiggling body of the Grobule.  Seri watched in shock - the
creature was reddish-orange instead of pink, with lines of little spikes
running down its back.  This wasn't what a Grobule was supposed to look
like.  It seemed oversized too, which explained why the cocoon had seemed
so large.  The fleshy body managed to wiggle its last segment out of the
cocoon like an oversized caterpillar and it began to inch its way up the
branch.

   Another Grobule - female, by the stripes - was resting in a crook in the
branches.  The first Grobule climbed up and pounced aggressively on it,
crawling on the female's back and digging its legs in like needles.  A tiny
squeal sounded from the victim and it tried to wiggle away, but it was
hopelessly pinned by the larger bug.  Seri watched in fascinated horror as
the male began to rape its prey, body moving forcefully as it shoved into
the female.

   Seri picked up her pencil, trying a few lines, then gave up.  She loved
to draw nature, bringing it to life on her paper, but this was unnatural.
She had contributed at least a hundred sketches to the botanists and
naturalists at the library in Unhandra where she had served, turning them
over so the scribes could trace and illuminate them and publish them in the
thickly-bound volumes that they put out every year for scholars, but lately
it seemed as if everything she drew had become...darker, somehow.  Twisted.
She could see it even in the fleshy bodies of the Grobules, their grublike
forms illuminated by the firelight.  The cycle was twisted now.  Unnatural.
Male Grobules became sexually aggressive after their last metamorphosis,
but not like this.  It was almost as if the bug had Monstrum blood in it.
She had observed more of this kind of behavior, as if their influence was
seeping in, having subtle effects on the natural species of the world. 
Seri didn't know how that was possible.  Maybe a Monstrum species had
crossbred somehow with the bugs here, passing on its rapacious nature to
its offspring.  Seri had heard countless wild tales from farmers on her
deployment; a man at one village had insisted that the local soldiers had
captured a Rapewolf alive, then thrown it in a pen with a regular dog bitch
just to see what would happen.  Supposedly she had borne some kind of
aggressive halfbreed.  The man didn't know how that had turned out, since
the town had fallen shortly thereafter.  The place wa a ghost town sitting
on top of an Arachma nest now.

   Seri shuddered, thinking of it - all those women and girls, captured
from the farming town by the enormous spiderling creatures and dragged into
their webbed tunnels under the earth to be bred relentlessly to produce
more Arachma for the hive.  Monstrum were everywhere these days,
encroaching relentlessly on human lands.  At first they had been a menace
relegated to the outskirts of Teleria, but as they had captured isolated
villages, they had taken the human women from each of them, raping and
breeding them like pigs to produce even more Monstrum from their wombs. 
Their numbers had swelled, allowing them to overpower larger villages and
towns.  The queen and her advisors had dispatched the full might of the
kingdom's soldiers and mages against the threat, but after years of
fighting there was no doubt: the humans were losing.  Even after recruiting
and training countless new mages like herself - young girls aged 10 to 18,
the only time when magical ability was manifest in humans - they still
suffered defeat after defeat.  Each girl lost was raped endlessly, exposed
to the mysterious Conversion effect in all Monstrum cum until she had
become a willing breeder.  Each loss gained the monsters more momentum. 
Each failure accelerated the human's defeat.  Teleria tottered on the brink
of collapse, shaken by famine and by encroaching enemies from all sides.

   There weren't enough mages left now to stop the tide.  The queen's
advisors had stubbornly insisted that traditional battle tactics - mixed
companies of hardened soldiers backed by the power of the mages - would win
the day.  Now the last hopes of the kingdom rested with girls like her.

   It was ridiculous.  This was her third deployment.  She was 12 now, and
she knew her magical abilities would never improve beyond what they were
now.  Seri didn't have a head for combat.  She wasn't a battlemage.  Her
talent was mostly unremarkable.  She preferred using her magic in scholarly
pursuits, and when her trainers realized that she actually had some
aptitude in that area they had assigned her to library duty to assist the
commanders and the older mages.

   Not that anyone really listened to her even then.  She was just a little
girl, after all.  When she had reported the man's account of the Rapewolf
halfbreed during her debriefing back at the capitol, she had been laughed
out of the room.  Rapewolves only liked to fuck little human girls, they
had sneered.  Girls like her.

   Seri sighed and closed her sketchpad.  The sounds she had been ignoring
were getting louder now - a girl panting, moaning with pleasure, clearly
audible even this far from the commander's tent.  Seri wondered why she had
to make so much noise.  Diena was her combat partner, supposedly, but Seri
found that she didn't like the other girl very much.  Dienna was a suckup
and a bully, and the company commander had taken a liking to her on this
deployment.  Varus summoned her to his tent almost every night.  Once, the
mages had commanded more respect, but that time was past.  Now none of the
other soldiers or mages batted an eye at the commander fucking a little
14-year-old girl.  Diena sure seemed to enjoy it.

   Well, so much for scholarship.  Seri got up from the stump and followed
the narrow path back to the main area of the camp, passing some of the
soldiers hunkered around a large campfire.  Their followed her with their
gazes, eyes crawling over her exposed body.  She was used to it, of course.
The uniform of the mages - a delicate array of gauzy dreamcloth strips and
jewelled allocite chains - barely even covered her young tits or ass.  It
was beautiful, to be sure, like something a princess would wear, but what
little there was of it was cut and flared to show off her feminine
features, with filmy cloth hugging her hips, slight coverings for her
breasts that were almost sheer, and a hanging skirt barely long enough in
front to conceal her pussy.  In fact, if the wind blew wrong, it didn't
even do that.  That's probably what the soldiers were hoping to get a
glimpse of.  Mages couldn't wear armor, since the channeling of magical
energies would corrode metal and leather as if they had been dipped in
acid, but the scanty uniform that she wore was scarcely better than being
naked.

   She passed the soldiers without meeting their gaze, then pulled back the
flap of her tent and went inside.  It wasn't all that big inside - the
soldiers got bigger ones - but it was big enough for her bedroll and her
things.  With Dienna gone for the moment, Seri had a chance now.  She
opened her pack and reached in to fish around for the heavy tome concealed
at the bottom.  The pack was magical, of course - a sack of powder-blue
dreamcloth that was always as light as a feather and much bigger inside
than outside.  It even shrunk by itself to the size of a coinpurse so she
could attach it to the allocite chain of her belt when she needed to.  With
her arm sunk up to the elbow, she finally found what she was looking for
and pulled it out.

   The cover was a deep ebony, studded with dark jewels and comprised of
some kind of unknown material that felt soft to the touch.  She wasn't
supposed to have this.  She had stolen it the night before leaving for her
deployment, taking it from the personal library of the Duchess of Anzer, a
high-ranking woman named Sheila who had stepped in to keep her from
flunking out of the academy and to whom she had served as a personal
assistant for several months.  Sheila was an astonishingly beautiful and
immensely powerful woman who had always looked down on Seri, rarely even
remembering her name.  She would never have let Seri have the book, so Seri
had simply taken it.  Part of her felt a little afraid of what would happen
if Sheila ever realized what she had done, but Seri knew that the book
belonged with the mages.  It was too important to leave in the hands of a
layperson.

   A magical hum seemed to radiate from the book as she ran her finger
along the scrollwork of the silvery metal that edged the cover.  It filled
her with a deeply unsettling feeling as if something were whispering her
name far off in the darkness.  The book was special.  The scholar in Seri
burned to know where the Monstrum came from, how they had come to this
world and how to stop them before they enslaved all of humanity.  This book
had something to do with it.  It was from the time of the Aen Sielle, a
civilization of glorious wonders and mighty mages that had fallen at the
height of its power.  Seri had caught a glimpse of a page as it lay open on
Sheila's desk one night.  Why would a grown woman have such a thing?  It
couldn't even be opened without magic, and everyone knew that magical
ability began to fade from a girl around the time she finished puberty. 
Seri thought Sheila had probably just acquired the book as a curiosity.  It
could be an important clue to stopping the Monstrum threat.  The secrets of
the Aen Sielle had been lost to time, but Seri knew that during their prime
that they had commanded tremendous magical powers and mastered secrets of
the universe long forgotten by humanity.

   The pages of the tome felt heavy to her touch, like they were made of
lead and welded tightly together.  She sent the barest trickle of magic
coursing through the cover, flowing through the magical design that
emblazoned it, and the book suddenly became light in her hands.

   She opened the cover.  She had never really been able to shake the
feeling that it was allowing itself to be opened, that her magic simply
asked for permission instead of unlocking anything.  Seri had seen a nearly
endless amount of magical tomes in her time at the library in the mage
academy, but nothing had ever compared to this, not even her copy of the
Monstrum Factorum that she carted with her everywhere.

   The first page inside the cover was a lushly illustrated scene depicting
a naked girl her own age squirming on the ground as she was penetrated and
raped by a horde of monsters crowding around her.  Seri recognized a few of
the Monstrum species, but even with her extensive studies of the Factorum
some of the other kinds were beyond her knowledge.  That meant little,
though.  The variety of Monstrum species was seemingly endless, and new
ones were being discovered all the time.  The scholars compiled entries of
known, verified information for each new species, as well as combat
instructions, and the information was magically transferred to the volumes
that every mage carried with her.  It was why she had to study it every
night, to keep current on her Monstrum knowledge.

   The tome showed her more things she didn't recognize as she turned the
pages, grand battles and councils of kings and depictions of fierce
champions locked in combat with terrifying monstrosities.  Events long past
and lost to time.  The language was an ancient dialect, and Seri could
translate some of it, but it was slow going.  Mostly she tried to glean
what she could from the illustrations.  Turning the pages, she found a
familiar scene at last.  This was where she had left off last time.

   The page showed a gathering of women encircling a vast ritual circle
scrawled on a stone floor.  Mages, Seri felt certain, though they seemed
too old and none seemed to be holding a staff to channel her power with. 
The mages of Aen Sielle somehow kept their powers past adolescence, Seri
had reasoned, and apparently they hadn't needed any tools like the A'sham
to channel their power.  More secrets lost to history.  Seri had never
heard of a mage keeping her power past the age of 18 until she had delved
into the dark pages of this book.

   The moaning sounds from nearby were increasing in pitch, turning into a
series of barely-muted squeals.  Dienna had trouble containing herself a
lot of the time.  Seri tried to block out the noise and concentrate.  The
mages were definitely engaged in some kind of ritual, with the thousands of
curling lines of the complicated diagram meticulously drawn and illuminated
with scattered candles.  Seri had a vague notion that the technique could
help shape and amplify a magical spell, but she had no idea how.  As far as
she knew, nobody now living knew the secret.  Humanity had lost so much
magical knowledge.  The current mages just couldn't compare with those
ancient powers.

   The text was too difficult to translate, too full of incantations and
concepts unknown to Seri.  She skipped ahead, vowing to come back to this
page later.  The knowledge is this book was priceless - full of things she
had never learned in the mage academy.  Infinite worlds.  Planes of eternal
light and darkness.  Powers that could shatter reality like an egg.  Seri
turned the pages, using information gleaned from the passages she
understood to try to untangle the mysteries of those she didn't.  There was
so much here that stretched far beyond current human understanding.

   The light from the fire outside was growing dim so Seri conjured a
magical light in her palm and tossed it gently upwards, letting it hang
suspended in the air like some kind of shimmering wisp.  Much better.  She
studied a few more pages before her curiosity got the better of her and she
tried to flip to the end of the book.  As usual, the pages near the back
resisted her fingers, sticking together tightly as if unwilling to divulge
their secrets.  Seri sent a trickle of her magic into the book to pry at
it, but something bit back at her with a slight shock and her spell seemed
to snap apart.  It always did that, and Seri had yet to figure out how. 
Nothing should be able to break a magical flow like that.  The book was
keeping something hidden, concealing it from her somehow.  Seri didn't know
what, but she was determined to keep trying each time until she figured it
out.

   The squeal of a little girl's climax peaked and then died away into the
night.  Now Seri could only hear the crickets and the occasional hoot of a
night owl.  She slammed the heavy volume shut and quickly shoved it back
into her pack to conceal it just before Dienna pulled the flap aside and
came into the tent.

   The 14-year-old was flushed and sweating, the diaphanous coverings of
her mage uniform in disarray.  Seri couldn't help but feel a little
jealous: Dienna was much prettier than her, maybe the prettiest girl Seri
had ever seen.  Her long chestnut hair glimmered in the firelight, marred
by only a few tangles from her escapades, and her lithe body was trim and
tight.  She had a pretty smile, when she chose to use it, but she only did
that for men.  She fixed Seri with a nasty expression instead.

   "Are you sketching again?" Dienna sneered.  "So worthless.  You're
always drawing and reading when you should be practicing your magic." Seri
clutched her pencil and paper, as good an alibi as any.  She could never
tell Dienna about the tome.  Seri looked down at the half-finished portrait
of the Grobule, chastised.

   "You can barely even conjure a lightning bolt," Dienna sniffed, crossing
the narrow space of the tent to her bedroll.  "Your magic is so bad.  Why
are you even out here?  This isn't your place."

   Seri's face burned with embarrassment.  Dienna was right, of course. 
Seri's combat magic was hopelessly weak.  She didn't know why they had sent
her out on assignments usually reserved for battlemages.  She had always
been bookish, preferring to study rather than play.  Maybe things were
getting so dire that even she had to be called to fight now.

   "You'd better not fuck up in battle," Dienna sniffed, flopping onto her
side on the soft bedroll.  "If you do, it's my ass on the line, and I
intend to keep those Monstrum cocks away from my ass and everything else."

   "I know, I know," murmured Seri, trying to placate her.  Dienna was
bigger than her, more senior and far more skilled with magic in addition to
being prettier and more athletic.  She had everything, it seemed.  Seri
watched out of the corner of her eye as Dienna turned away on the bedroll
to go to sleep.  A small trickle of white goo was oozing down the girl's
thigh.  Dienna seemed to get everything she wanted.  It hadn't taken
commander Varus long to take a liking to her.  Seri wasn't a stranger to
bending over and taking it when a man felt the need - none of the little
girls who trained as mages were - but she couldn't help but feel a twinge
of jealousy.

   With a sigh, she put her sketchpad away and rolled over on her own
bedroll.  Listening to Dienna get fucked had stirred her own memories into
an ache in her heart.  She missed her brother so much.  Marcus was the
oldest of her 5 brothers, handsome and strong and always kind to her.  He
even protected Seri when her other brothers tried to pick on her.  She had
first doubled up in a bunk with him when she was 8 and he was 14 - mom was
having another baby and needed the bed - and that was when she first
discovered how much she liked what a boy had between his legs.  Their tiny
farmhouse had offered little privacy, so Seri had had to bite the pillow to
avoid squeaking and waking her other brothers as Marcus fucked her long
after everyone else had dropped off to sleep.  She hadn't been a stupid
girl.  She had always known what the noises mom and dad made meant, but
until Marcus had squeezed his cock into the tiny gap of her little pussy as
a child, she hadn't known how good it felt.

   Instinctively, her fingers dipped down lower, under the gossamer flap of
her uniform.  Marcus had always made her feel like everything was going to
be alright.  He was good-hearted to the core, tender and gentle in bed.  He
never let his enthusiasm for fucking his little sister carry him away so
much that he hurt her.  Seri moved a finger down the groove of her slit,
feeling the wetness of her arousal as she imagined her brother again, the
feel of his arms around her tiny body, squeezing her flat tits as his cock
pushed up inside her tight little cunt.

   She dipped a finger into the moist heat.  Her brother had fucked her
quite a lot over the years.  Every night in bed of course, but sometimes he
found her out in the fields or in the barn with the sheep and would lay her
down or bend her over a hay bale and shove it inside of her.  Mom had
always looked at her disapprovingly whenever she returned to the farmhouse
with her country dress all wrinkled and dirty, sighing about how hard it
would be to get the stains out.  Another finger slipped in beside the
first, her cunt lips stretching tightly around both digits.  Seri twitched
in the bedroll, unable to help the tiny moan that escaped her mouth. 
Marcus had always dutifully cum inside of her, filling her little girl womb
with his sperm on a daily basis.  She had been sure she would grow up with
him and have his babies.  The farming life didn't offer many options but he
was all she had wanted.  Her parents had been ecstatic when the recruiter
from the Magisterium had come through and tested her for magical ability,
but for Seri, that day had been the end of her world.  Once it was found
that she had the touch, she had been bundled off to the academy with barely
a goodbye for her family.

   The itch had blossomed into a warm fuzzy pulse between her legs.  Seri
moved her fingers faster, slipping them in and out of her cunt, thinking of
her brother as she did so.  Chopping wood on the hot days of summer. 
Working with his shirt off in the barn.  Another moan escaped her lips. 
What she wouldn't give to feel her brother's cock sliding inside her
12-year-old body once again --

   Her fingers dipped in and out, thrusting into the trembling tightness of
her pussy.  Waves of pleasure radiated up from her crotch.  Seri drew her
legs up, frigging her cunt furiously and tickling her clit with her other
hand.  The pulse grew, then flared, and finally erupted into a shock of
ecstasy that raced up her spine and exploded in her brain.  She shoved her
fingers as deeply into her cunt as she could, feeling her pussy walls
quiver and her body tremble under the cover of the bedroll.

   Her climax ebbed in gentle waves like a receding tide, the sharp tension
draining from her muscles.  Seri panted in her bedroll, fingers slick and
gooey with the juices from her crotch.  Maybe she would see him again. 
Maybe they could beat back the monsters and she wouldn't have to be out
here, ready to fight them with her magic.  She could go home.  She could
feel his arms and the heat of his body pressed against her again.  The
thought brought a smile to Seri's face as she drifted at the twilight of
sleep.

   The camp had quieted and surrendered to the buzzing of cicadas. 
Dienna's breathing was soft, regular.  She was already asleep.  Seri
wondered why she liked the commander so much.  He was a surly man.  Maybe
she liked to be close to someone powerful.  Maybe he was just that good in
bed.  Years ago, it would have been frowned on for any soldier to fuck the
mages in their company, but now, well...it seemed like everything had
changed.  The mages used to have commanders of their own, skilled liasons
that could work in both the martial realm of the traditional soldiers and
also the complicated tactics of the mages.  They hadn't had those in a
while though.  Now the soldiers looked at her hungrily whenever the rain
turned her top transparent to reveal her nipples, or when the skirt
fluttered in the breeze and flashed her cunt.  Such stares were just part
of being a mage, she supposed.

   She shifted in the bedroll, getting more comfortable.  She'd find the
answers.  She'd figure out how to stop the relentless tide of the monsters.
The answer was in that tome somewhere, she was sure of it.  That little
hope was all she had to cling to.  When they won, then she could go home
again to Marcus and offer herself to him and let him put a baby inside her.
The thought was warm, comforting.  It lulled Seri like a lullaby, and
within moments she drifted off into the peaceful darkness of sleep.



   ~*~

   Fire and screams surrounded her.  The night was black as pitch except
for the blazing pyres that dotted the battlefield and the flickers of
brilliant blue from the lightning bolts that arced from the fingers of the
mages around her.  Seri fought frantically, blood thumping in her ears as
she tried to remember her training.  She condensed her power from the
ether, giving it form and molding it and then hurling it into a savage
vortex of power.  The earth splintered and erupted where she had been
aiming, sending the charging Org-reh tumbling to the ground.

   Where were the soldiers?  They were supposed to be holding the line. 
Instead they had fled, cowed by the fearsome Org - mottled brutes with
tough skin and bulging muscles that towered over the height of a man.  Seri
turned around, her staff gripped tightly in her hands.  The jewel of the
A'sham at the tip of her staff gleamed with inner light, a focus that
helped her touch and form her power.  It would be hot to the touch, Seri
knew, with all the magical power she was pulling through it.

   She swung her staff and pointed it, releasing a razor-sharp blast of
air. The Org-reh that had been reaching for the little mage girl next to
her howled with pain, blood spurting as its skin was sliced open.  Good
thing that one wasn't armored.  Maybe he had had no luck on the last raid.
The mage flashed her a grateful grin before turning to fling more spells at
the advancing horde.

   Seri's heart sank as she turned to look at the battlefield.  Dozens of
Org-reh were advancing over the muddy ground toward where the mages were
being pinned and driven to fight back-to-back.  Their clubs were held high
and some of the brutes carried nets.  Her first deployment, and already it
was a disaster.  Her training hadn't prepared her for this.  She had read
the section in her Monstrum Factorum on Org dozens of times, memorizing
every word.  Useless, all of it.  Now they were coming for her and her
sisters.  An icy spike of fear filled Seri's heart - was she going to die?
No, she knew.  Org didn't kill mages.  That was why they had clubs and
nets. Her fate would be different.

   An unseen impact knocked Seri off her feet.  She hit the ground hard and
rolled, the breath knocked out of her and her staff flying from her hands.
She looked up and saw the terrifying monster that had delivered the blow -
a massive Org, 10 feet tall at least, with a spiked helmet and a club the
size of a tree trunk.  He grinned wickedly down at her, seeing her
helpless, unable to cast without the magical aid of her staff.  It wasn't
the expression that paralyzed Seri with fear though, it was the armor he
wore - living armor, small girls her own age strapped to the brute's body
by chains and leather straps.  They were naked, struggling, crying out. 
Org loved to do this, to armor themselves in their prey.  It made them hard
to kill.  What mage could strike out with fire or slice with air when they
risked harming innocent girls?  The girl in front, strapped to the Org's
chest, was screeching and squirming.  Her tiny naked body was impaled on
the Org's massive erect cock.  The beast was thrusting its pelvis slightly,
enjoying the feel of the little girl's slippery pussy and relishing her
screams, fucking her even as it fought.

   For a moment Seri saw herself in the girl's place.  Org loved to rape
little human girls.  An Org commander's worth could be judged by the size
of his harem, each girl hand-picked from the plunders of battle.  Favored
girls were prized as personal sex slaves, but the rest were gangraped
almost endlessly by the Org rank-and-file, then bred and sold.  Or worse,
ended up like this.  Maybe it would be Seri herself up there in the next
battle, ankles and wrists tied tightly by the straps, spread-eagled against
the monster's muscular chest as its thick cock railed her body from below.
A small part of her was screaming at herself to find her staff, to fight
back, but the fear overcame her and she cowered as the brute reached down a
massive hand to grab her --

   Seri's eyes flew open.  She was drenched with sweat in her bedroll and
breathing hard.  Nightmares, again.  She wasn't sure why they had returned
this time.  They had rallied and won that battle even though things had
initially turned against them.  Seri hadn't ended up as a little piece of
fuckmeat armor for an Org-reh, hadn't ended up in the slave pens drinking
cum from troughs and being bred like cattle.  But so many of her friends
had, falling either to the Org-reh or to other monsters, each taken in turn
and raped and impregnated with Monstrum spawn to bolster their numbers. 
And it was even worse to know that her fallen friends were surely relishing
their fate, were probably happier than Seri was right now.

   She groaned and sat up on her bedroll, then stretched and yawned, trying
to shake the haze of the fading nightmare.  Dienna was still fast asleep
opposite her, a satisfied smile on her pretty face.  The 14-year-old
usually slept well after being fucked, Seri knew, and she did that a lot.
She wasn't shy about it either.  Everyone in the camp knew when the
commander was having another taste of his main squeeze.  Maybe he'd get
tired of her tight little ass and move on to another of the mages.  Dienna
wouldn't mind too much.  In the academy, she really liked to get around,
sucking and fucking and offering up her little preteen pussy to any of the
instructors that would give her a good grade.  There probably weren't many
guys there that hadn't fucked her by the time she graduated.  All it took
was a casual sweep of her shimmering hair and a timely bat of her long
eyelashes and every male in 100 yards would come running with a bulge in
their pants.

   Seri crept quietly past the other girl and peeked out of the tent flap.
The tall trees of the forest rose up overhead on all sides.  Dawn was a
distant rumor on the horizon, a faint glow of amber rays breaching the
mountains and striking the clouds overhead.  The smells of breakfast
drifted past Seri's nose: roasted sausage and eggs.  They had resupplied at
the last village, and the soldiers had been grateful to put aside their
dried rations for fresh food again.

   She stepped out and took a deep breath of the morning air.  Having grown
up on a farm, she was used to rising with the dawn.  That part of
soldiering had been an easy adjustment for her.  Several soldiers were
moving about the camp already and even more were rising bleary-eyed from
their bedrolls to join them.  Seri took a moment to adjust her uniform -
the filmy scraps of blue dreamcloth did very little to clothe the
12-year-old girl's form.  The fabric of her top was woven in a scanty
pattern, intricately meshed with the tiny golden chains of allocite.  The
straps of cloth were draped in delicate folds around her upper arms,
leaving her shoulders bare with the cloth hanging down slightly in an open
sleeve.  The neckline was a hanging necklace of allocite, braided with
scanty dreamcloth that stretched down over her flat breasts as if in a
halfhearted effort to hide them.  She could see her own nipples faintly
through the fabric even in the poor light.  Jewels were studded into the
weave of allocite wherever the tiny chains crossed - the gems were actually
cheaper even than the expensive blue dreamcloth, and they were useful to
mages too since they could be enspelled.  A mesh of sapphires twinkled from
her hips and a trail of topaz and emerald stones followed the criss-cross
of golden chain down from the hem of her top and across her bare belly
while a lone ruby stud gleamed from her navel.

   In her old life, Seri would have gawked at such an opulent and beautiful
garment.  Now she just sighed and fruitlessly adjusted it.  It was no use.
Several of the soldiers were already surreptitiously looking her way.  The
dress of a mage was always a spectacle, designed to catch every eye and
lend a flowing grace to her girlish form.  A mage moving in the light
sparkled from the gems that graced her uniform.  Seri moved down into the
camp, ignoring the hungry male gazes as she headed for the mess tent.  She
was used to their eyes, to the crawling leers that slithered over her
shoulders and across her bare belly, taking in the curves of her little
girl hips.  She tried to replace their looks with thoughts of Marcus
looking at her, seeing her in the beautiful and revealing uniform of a
mage. She missed him so much.  Sure, he had seen every part of her many
times, but she shivered slightly thinking about how he would enjoy seeing
his little sister in such extravagant clothing, how he would press his hand
up against her chest and slip his fingers under the filmy cloth, tweaking
her nipple while the other hand trailed down her belly and dipped under the
hanging scrap that covered her pussy --

   She shook her head to clear it.  Focus.  The cook was staring at her. 
She held out the chipped plate she had grabbed, and he heaped a scoop of
eggs and half a sausage into it with a grunt.  Seri turned and headed back
to her tent, weaving around the soldiers in her way.  Once, they would have
made way for a mage, back when things were going better, when they still
had respect and discipline.  Now Seri just wondered which one of them would
try to catch her alone tonight.  Pussy was in short supply for the men when
they were deployed, and having a luscious troupe of fuckable little preteen
mages in revealing uniforms with them made for a lot of surly and very
horny soldiers.

   Seri poked a finger into the eggs as she walked and swished them about.
No bugs this time, thank the gods.  Just eggs, warm and fresh.  Her mouth
was already watering when she pulled back the flap and entered her tent.

   "Didn't get me any?" Dienna sneered as she entered.  "It's not hard to
hold two bowls, Seri.  Why are you so worthless?"

   "Sorry --" mumbled Seri, looking down, abashed.  She really hadn't
thought of it.  Her mind had been far away, drifting in the clouds and
dreaming of her brother.

   "It's fine.  Forget it." Dienna was brushing her hair, teasing out the
tangles in the long, silky river of chestnut brown.  She gave Seri a
magnanimous smile - insincere, Seri knew - and then tossed down the brush
before getting up to leave.

   "You know," she said, pausing at the flap.  "Maybe you'd be able to
concentrate on your magic more if you were a bit more relaxed." Her smile
was sultry and mocking.  "Satisfied.  You know.  It helps.  If you want
just say the word and I'll clear out for a while.  That sergeant they call
Kodiak was sniffing around again last night.  I know he was looking for
you. Maybe something nice and stiff is just what you need."

   "Er, ok.  Thanks." Seri bit back her distaste and managed a smile that
looked at least somewhat grateful.  Dienna just smirked at her and left. 
Seri sighed again and dug into her breakfast, famished.  Even if she had
never been the prettiest girl in the room, she managed to catch the eyes of
her fair share of men.  Her auburn hair and slender body invited plenty of
looks, and even the occasional pinch or slap on the rump.  And she knew how
to get them off, what made them happy and what made them horny and how to
suck their cocks if you just wanted it over with quickly.  Some of the
soldiers were cute enough, she supposed, but none of them held a candle to
Marcus.

   She finished quickly, scarfing the eggs and tearing at the sausage
hungrily, then began her daily routine.  There were spells to cast,
assigned wards that would warn of coming monsters.  They were limited
though; a single ward could only detect a single type of monster, and
running more than two was exceptionally difficult.  Seri wondered why the
mages of Aen Sielle had never seemed to have such limitations.  Her hidden
tome spoke of magical wonders almost beyond comprehension: floating cities,
tunnels of air through the sky that one could fly through, vast monuments
sculpted by magical forces lost to time.  No mage now living had the power
or knowledge to accomplish even a small fraction of what the mages of old
seemed to do on a daily basis.

   After casting wards against Arachma and Slime Horrors - two of the most
common Monstrum found in temperate forests like this one - she readied more
spells for herself.  The weaves tingled on her skin as they settled over
her, crystallized matrices of power that flashed around her body like a web
and then vanished.  Vigor.  Fast Healing.  Warmth.  Water breath.  Shields
of air that could soften blows.  Seri knew her magic wasn't very powerful,
that her enchantments would be weak and barely worth casting, but she
prepared just as she had been trained.

   Men shouted orders and cursed outside her tent as they tore down the
camp.  They were almost ready.  Seri left her tent and joined the line of
mages waiting at the edge of the clearing.  Such an odd contrast, Seri
thought: the burly, swearing men hauling barrels and bedrolls and loading
horses, and the line of a dozen small girls clothed in such delicate and
revealing uniforms, as if on display for the leering male gazes.  The
youngest mage with them was Danae, 11, one year behind Seri and also on her
first deployment, and Sarithia was the oldest at 16.  They all waited
patiently as the last of the gear was stowed onto horses and wagons. 
Finally, just at midmorning, the commander bellowed the order to move out.

   Seri marched with her sisters, the girls staying in the center of the
loose formation as the company followed the muddy forest road.  She kept
her staff at the ready, peering around at the dense forest and checking the
canopy of trees overhead.  You could never be too careful.  Sometimes
Arachma would spin webs in trees.  Seri's wards would tell her if any were
nearby, but nothing was a substitute for your own eyes.  All she could see
was the normal forest life though.  Birds.  Startled deer.  Small animals
peeping from the cover of their dens in the bushes and hollow logs.

   Seri jumped nervously at the sudden thrashing sound overhead.  A flock
of starlings took off in a wild flurry from one of the trees overhead,
disturbed by the noise of their passing.  Seri watched the birds take wing,
wishing she had the time to stop and sketch them.

   "You know, I'd probably look just as tired as you do, if I had to sleep
in the same tent with HER," Val said, sidling up next to her.  Seri
returned the girl's friendly smile.  She liked Val.  They were the same age
and had attended the same classes back at the academy, and Seri had found
herself drawn to Val's good-natured goofiness.  She wished Val was the one
assigned to be her battle partner.

   "I don't even know how you manage it.  She's as grumpy as an Org-reh and
almost as mean." Val pointed a finger at Dienna, who was taking with the
commander up ahead as they marched, slathering him with smiles and laughing
girlishly at all of his bawdy jokes while hanging on his arm.  One of his
gauntleted hands crept down her bare back and kept going, dipping under the
preposterously short skirt and squeezing the 14-year-old girl's rump
tightly.  Dienna flushed and squeaked with mock protest, but leaned further
into him, purring against his arm.

   "She's not so bad," Seri said.  "She's only really terrible when she
can't get laid."

   "She's got a mean mouth on her," Val muttered.  "It only stops when
she's got something to fill it.  They're perfect for each other."

   The commander was hardly pleasant either - a thickly-muscled man with a
perpetually bitter scowl hardened by years of fighting and loss.  His
expression softened only slightly as he let his eyes crawl over the tight
curves of the pretty little girl leaning on his arm.  Seri wondered how
long until he called a halt, how long he could hold off before the urge to
stuff his cock into Dienna overcame his good sense.

   "They're not even paying attention," Seri complained, looking around at
the forest again and scanning for danger.  "Anything could be out here. 
Alara is pretty remote.  It took months for the reports of Chrysilae
nesting in the mountains to even reach the duke."

   "Well, even if they're not prepared, we can be," Val said, her friendly
smile returning.  "We know they've barely been fending off the attacks from
the bugs, and they've lost a lot of girls."

   Seri nodded, thinking about it.  She had lost too many friends to the
Monstrum, to the Org-reh and Rapewolves, and spidery Arachma and the
Centaurum and the countless other species of rapacious monstrosities.  They
had been taken, raped, bred relentlessly until their bodies and minds had
been thoroughly transformed into willing breeders, hungry and eager and
constantly craving the sexual bliss that defined their new existence.  The
Conversion effect inherent in the cum of every Monstrum race did that.  The
adaptations varied from species to species - exposure to Centaurum cum, for
example, toughened and lengthened the vaginal canal, causing a slow
shifting of a girl's internal organs until she could accommodate almost all
of the substantial length and girth of the enormous horsecocks that the
creatures had.

   "We'll probably have to fight them at the village first, the next time
they attack.  If we kill enough, then we can move in on the hive.  Get
those girls back." Val's grin was infectious.  "Then we'll be famous, Seri.
Just think about it.  Fame.  Fortune.  Cute guys fawning over you."

   Seri laughed.  "Sure, sure.  They'll talk about us all over Teleria. 
'Seri and Val.  Heroes of the Land.  Saviors of whatever-that-village-was."

   "Everyone at the academy will recognize us." Val giggled at her own
sarcasm We'll get commendations from the Magisterium.  The queen will
shower us with riches.  They'll have a parade for us in the capitol."

   "We'll be master mages.  Everyone will look up to us.  We'll beat back
all the Monstrum and save Teleria." Seri allowed herself the brief fantasy,
sharing Val's laugher.  The two girls snorted and snickered together,
drawing a few odd looks from the soldiers shepherding them as they marched.

   "And then we can go home," she said.  Seri meant it for a laugh, but it
had a sobering effect.  Their good mood evaporated like morning fog, and
their snickers died away as if absorbed by the oppressive silence of the
forest.  Seri wanted more than anything to go home to Marcus.  She looked
over at Val, saw her friend's pensive frown.  She wondered what Val had
left behind, who was waiting for her if she ever managed to get home again.

   "I was reading the entry for Chrysilae in my Factorum again," Val said,
breaking the uncomfortable silence.  "They've updated it.  We didn't really
know much about them before since they're a new species."

   This was another reason she liked Val: the girl was smart, a model
student.  She would be a good battle partner.  She could memorize entire
sections of the Monstrum Factorum and recite them word-for-word.  The magic
of their books ensured that the information inside them was always up to
date, so if Val said they had changed something, they had definitely
changed it.  Seri pulled her copy of the book from her things on the nearby
wagon and opened it up, her fingers quickly finding the section for
Chrysilae amongst the thousands of entries.

   The chapter opened with a detailed picture of the oversized blue bug;
Seri had seen this picture before, but now there were others too.  The
creatures were thin-bodied and very wasp-like, but they were as big as a
mountain lion, with segmented bodies and protruding antennae and 3 sets of
jointed legs extending from their underside.  They would use those to
subdue a girl and wrap them around her, she knew, holding her tightly
against its abdomen as it flew.  Seri shuddered, thinking about it. 
Chrysilae didn't even wait until they were back in the hive to rape you. 
She looked at the next picture, which showed a Chrysilae in flight with a
shrieking little girl that couldn't have been older than 10 clutched
tightly underneath it.  Where the bug's stinger should have been was a big,
flexible phallus jutting from the base of its abdomen, and the erect organ
was lodged deeply into the girl's tiny pussy.  The picture was anatomically
correct in every way, richly detailed by the scribes, right down to the
tiny hairs on the bug's legs and the buglike ridges on the thick, throbbing
flesh it was using to violate its prey.  Seri could almost hear the little
girl's cries.

   The text was familiar.  Seri already knew how they flew, how they
fought, how the buzzing sound they made could vibrate in your skull and
cause immediate and overpowering horniness.  It was another reason they
were particularly dangerous.  Seri skimmed the entry.

   "This part's new," Val said, tapping a picture on the opposite page.  It
was a cutaway diagram, showing a cross-section of the Chrysilae's body as
it penetrated a struggling form beneath it.  Seri could see how the bug had
three red bulbs at the base of its cock that seemed like they held some
sort of fluid.

   "A flying Chrysilae will rape its victim enthusiastically while in the
air, usually ejaculating inside several times before it returns to the
hive." Seri read the entry out loud, Val nodding along with her.  "A
Chrysilae prefers to penetrate its girl deeply and rely on the natural
vibrations of its sexual organ to bring pleasure along with its thrusting
motions.  A series of small orifices on the surface of the phallus are
capable of absorbing certain kinds of moisture, and the natural lubrication
emitted by a girl as she orgasms is harvested through this method and
pulled through a specialized vascular system that stores the fluid in sacs
in the abdomen.  This process appears to be essential to the Chrysilae
lifecycle.

   "So, they drink pussy juice.  Not the first Monstrum species to do
that," Val said.  Seri shuddered, trying not to look too closely at the
detailed illustration of a Chrysilae cock.  She wondered how the species
survived wherever it came from if it needed to drink the fluids of the
little girls that it raped.  Were there girls there too?

   Val gestured, so Seri read the next paragraph, ignoring the shocked
stares of some of the nearby soldiers that had been listening in.

   "The fluid is digested and secreted again in the form of the sticky blue
resin that oozes from the sacs on the abdomen.  The function of the resin
is twofold: it comprises the structure of the interior of a Chrysilae hive,
dividing it into chambers, and it restrains the hive's prey in cells.  Each
hexagonal cell is large enough for one girl, and when one is deposited in a
new cell she is raped constantly until she is coated with the substance
harvested from her own fluids.  The resin rapidly crystallizes, sealing the
girl in place with only her head and genitals exposed.  Initial testing
revealed the surprising result that the Conversion effect of the Chrysilae
species is potent only in the resinous secretions when they are first
exuded as mucus-like sludge, and exposure to bare skin effects a very rapid
process as the substance solidifies.  Orgasm intensity increases by a
factor of at least 10, and the womb and cervix are enlarged internally. 
Ovarian transmutation occurs within a few days, after which a girl thusly
subdued is able to conceive insect progeny for the hive.  Mature hives have
been observed to contain hundreds of cells, each containing a single girl
in varying stages of pregnancy."

   "Fun, eh?" Val smirked.  "Like bees.  Except we're the honey."

   Seri slammed the book shut and thrust it hastily back into her pack. 
Like every good mage, she studied her Monstrum Factorum diligently,
memorizing every single image and word in depth.  Some of the recorded
facts made no sense to her: why was it necessary to measure the average
ejaculate volume of an Org-reh?  Why should she know how long it took to
gestate Arachma eggs, or what the elasticity coefficient of a vagina was
when accommodating the oversized horsecock of a Centaurum?  Yet the academy
had drilled her relentlessly on these facts.  All part of being a mage, she
supposed, yet sometimes the book seemed like a cruel promise, a detailed
description of the fate that awaited her if she failed in her duty even
once.

   Val chuckled at Seri's huffy reaction, and opened her mouth to say
something, but it was drowned out by a sudden, deafening roar.  Screams
came from the side of the column.  Seri whirled around, staff in hand,
magic tingling in her fingertips and ready to strike out.  Something was
moving on the other side of the wagon.  Something massive.  Seri watched in
horror as the wagon itself suddenly shuddered from an impact, and then was
slammed aside by a mighty blow.

   "Ursa!" Val screamed at her side, swinging her staff forward to loose
her magic.  Seri's jaw dropped: the tremendous creature of brown fur lashed
out with a huge paw, knocking a pair of soldiers aside like toys.  It was
bigger than a normal bear, bigger than an ox - the biggest creature she had
ever seen, with massive, slavering jaws and a sea of muscles rippling under
its hide.  Seri screamed with terror, the sound lost in the creature's
bellowing roar as it reared up before her.

   A tremendous thump shook the clearing as an invisible fist of air
smashed into the beast, knocking it down as if hit by a boulder.  Val was
casting another spell at her side.  The mages were forming up.  The
soldiers, initially scattered, were screaming orders at each other and
advancing slowly, weapons held in terrified grips.  But more Ursa burst out
of the undergrowth, half a dozen of them, a wall of fury that smashed
through the soldiers in a bloody wave.  Seri's heart screamed with fear as
she tried to remember her training: Ursa were immensely powerful, almost
immune to physical damage.  It was definitely not recommended to take them
on head-on.  Preparing an area with lethal traps and luring them in was
about the only effective method, but that chance had already passed.

   A trio of soldiers raced to confront the beast in front of her.  The
Ursa growled and ripped its way right through them with its massive claws.
The soldiers screamed and fell in sprays of blood.  They had no chance. 
The beast had spotted her, its beady eyes locking on her delicate, exposed
body.  It roared and raced forward, straight for her, the powerful muscles
of its legs driving its charge.

   Seri loosed a lightning bolt in its face.  The white-hot arc smashed
into the creature, barely slowing it.  It screamed in a rage, barreling
down on her.  How could such a big creature move so fast?  For a moment,
Seri stood paralyzed, imagining herself ripped apart in a spray of bloody
viscera by those claws.  But in the back of her mind she knew that Ursa
never hurt little girls.  No, they did something far different to them.

   Her training kicked in and Seri recovered just in time.  She loosed her
magic again.  The world shifted about her dizzily, as if she was briefly in
two places at once.  She could feel the hot, ravenous breath and the sweaty
fur barely brush her arm as the Ursa crashed right by her, charging through
the illusion of herself that she had left in her place several feet to the
right after teleporting.  Not as hard a trick as it looked, doing that. 
One of the few spells she could do well.  It bought her a few precious
seconds as the Ursa whirled, turning on her again, realizing that it had
been tricked.

   Power raced through her in a torrent, as if the heartbeat of the cosmos
itself pumped in her veins.  She seized the magic, sculpting it, condensing
its potential from the invisible weave that suffused all things.  She felt
it drop into place, its mold set, pouring into the intricate channels of
power that she dictated through sheer power of will.  With a swing of her
staff, she gave it form.  A large translucent sphere formed instantly in
front of her, shimmering purple, and hurtled like a cannonball at the
charging beast.

   The impact was completely silent.  The Ursa suddenly slowed mid-charge
as it entered the purple field.  Its movements played out as if caught in
molasses, its charge arrested as it was reduced to a fraction of its former
speed.  It wouldn't last long, and Seri wasn't powerful enough to move the
field without dispelling it.  She had bought herself a few more seconds. 
She whirled her staff and held it in front of her defensively, feeling the
power flickering through the A'sham - the large gem ensconced in filigree
at the top of the staff.  She tried to think of something, anything.  She
wasn't strong enough to kill it, but with the right tactics maybe she could
at least fend it off.

   "There you are!" Dienna snarled, appearing suddenly at her side.  "Some
battle partner you are, Seri.  Maybe you could at least guard my back." The
girl turned, spinning her staff gracefully like it was an extension of
herself, and a green bolt of power erupted from the end, soaring towards
the Ursa snared in the purple field and setting it ablaze.  The beast
roared in pained fury.

   Seri stood with her back to Dienna, staff primed, ready to lash out
again.  Fire was somewhat effective as a deterrent, she remembered.  The
Factorum did have useful information alongside its many diagrams of little
girls being raped.  She was alright with fire spells but decided to leave
that to Dienna.  She scanned the opposite side of the clearing, eyes
darting.  She felt the heat of another fireball behind her as Dienna
condensed her magic and sent it at the enemy.  Smoke began to pour through
the clearing, the fire spreading rapidly to the wagons.  Seri coughed, her
eyes watering.

   Her nerve was shattered by another ear-splitting roar.  A pair of Ursa
barrelled out of the smoke and charged the center of the clearing,
scattering the soldiers like a line of threshed wheat and smashing into the
huddled group of mages.  They were so fast.  Seri barely managed to avoid
the main impact, glancing off the beast's furry hide and rolling to the
side, but Dienna caught the full force of it.  Seri saw the girl thrown
upwards, cartwheeling in the air with the small flaps of her uniforms
trailing like gossamer ribbons, and then land hard on her stomach several
feet away.

   Dienna's staff had spun out of her hands and clattered to the ground. 
The Ursa dipped its head and seized it in its jaws, and Seri heard the
sound of crunching wood.  The creature shook its head like a dog with a
toy, growling as splinters went flying.  Dienna was lying helpless on the
ground a few feet away, the wind knocked out of her, and now that she was
no threat the massive creature wasted no time and pounced on the helpless
girl.

   Seri rolled on the ground, struggling to think.  She had been knocked
aside, and a deep pain lanced through her shoulder when she moved her arm.
Where was her own staff?  There.  She reached out with shaky fingers,
feeling the smooth length of ash.  Fear pounded a frantic drumbeat in her
skull.  She had to save Dienna.  Coughing from the smoke, she rolled onto
her side and scrambled to her feet.

   Ursa were massive brutes, oversized compared to their natural cousins.
The Ursa on top of Dienna kept her pinned effortlessly, and Seri watched in
shock as those fearsome jaws ducked and tore the flimsy uniform off the
girl.  Dreamcloth was strong, despite how delicate it looked, but those
teeth tore right through it, snapping the delicate allocite chains and
ripping the cloth like it was spider silk.  Blue scraps and shattered links
of tiny chain studded with gems flew into the air as the creature savaged
Dienna, the little girl screaming and struggling underneath it.  Not pain,
Seri knew.  Fear.  Terror.  The Ursa wouldn't hurt a little girl like her.
It had something else in mind.  In no time at all the Ursa had stripped her
naked.Seri saw the massive organ dangling between the creature's legs, an
erect length of iron-hard bearcock as big as her arm.  The bulging flesh
slid hungrily along the the crack of Dienna's bare ass as the Ursa
maneuvered itself into position.  Dienna struggled even harder, feeling the
beast's cock positioning itself against her bottom, but the heavy paws
clamped down on her reaching arms and kept her pinned.

   Seri's mind reeled as she tried to think of a spell to cast.  A fireball
wouldn't help.  She couldn't risk hurting Dienna.  She couldn't muster
enough force or a sharp enough blade of air to even pierce the beast's
hide. What could she do against something so powerful?

   "Seri!  Fucking do something!" Dienna screeched.  The girl was crying,
soot and dirt on her face and her lovely hair tangled and soaked with the
Ursa's dripping saliva.  Seri watched, paralyzed, as the beast reared back
with its pelvis, muscles rippling.  The tremendous girth of pink flesh
quivered in the air briefly, all three feet of it pointed down at the
girl's bare sex with the bulbous glans grazing her labia.  With a growl,
the Ursa slammed down, ramming its cock home and penetrating the shrieking
girl.

   This couldn't be happening.  It was the Org-reh all over again.  Seri
looked around frantically.  Another mage was down, Sarithia, the oldest
girl.  The other Ursa was straddling her, and as Seri watched it positioned
itself and slammed its massive cock straight into the girl's tiny pussy,
stretching it obscenely.  The girl wailed, clenched fists slamming the dirt
as she got her first taste of monstrous bearcock rammed into her cunt.  The
Ursa moved back and forth over her, the girl speared on its phallus, her
body sliding freely on the ground.

   A lance of blinding blue light crackled out of the sooty darkness behind
Seri, the lightning bolt passing just over her head.  She turned.  It was
Val!  The girl was striding forward out of the smoke, staff twirling, the
air around her humming with an almost tangible power.  She sent another
bolt into the nearest Ursa, the creature roaring in pain and rage as its
rape was interrupted.  Good idea, Seri thought.  Lightning.  If it was
aimed right it wouldn't hurt the girls.  Seri moved her own staff and
gathered her power, sending a limp flicker arcing at the oversized bear. 
It wasn't much, but Val was pumping bolt after bolt into the creatures in a
wild frenzy, and more mages were rallying out of the smoke.  Another girl
joined them, flinging spells, then another.  They must have driven the rest
of the pack off.The pair of Ursa roared, outnumbered, and then turned and
loped awkwardly from the clearing, disappearing into the trees.

   No, Seri thought.  An Ursa's cock was lined with several layers of
flaring ridges, a perfect cork for a little girl's tight pussy.  Once an
erect Ursa penetrated a girl it was almost impossible to pry her off until
the beast was finished.  Dienna and Sarithia were still impaled out there
in the bushes, tiny bodies struggling as they were dragged along
unwillingly.  Their cries faded swiftly, swallowed by the forest and the
sounds of crackling fire and men screaming in pain.



   ~*~

   "You fucking worthless little cunts!  Where was the fucking warning? 
You spend all that time casting your fucking spells and not a peep from you
before those fucking monsters jumped right on top of us!"

   The vein in the Varus' forehead flushed purple as he screamed at them.
The mages had barely pulled themselves together, healing the worst of their
own wounds and then helping the soldiers as best they could.  Only a few of
them had any real talent for healing magic.  Seri rested on a stump,
crying, with Val leaning against her for comfort.  She had failed.  She had
lost her battle partner, the girl that had depended on her.  Right now
Dienna and Sarithia and the half-dozen other girls that had been taken were
being raped silly in the Ursa dens, new mates for the bearlike monsters to
impregnate.  Seri took a deep breath, sniffling, trying to dry her eyes, to
banish the images.  They persisted, the cold promise of the diagrams in the
Factorum lingering in her head.  Little girls sweating and grunting,
rutting on the floor, enormous lengths of erect bearcock slamming into them
as they howled until the pleasure overcame them.  Bear semen spewed inside
them, filling their wombs, flooding out of the tight channels of their
pussies to collect in gooey puddles on the floor between their legs.  At
least the Conversion effects of Ursa were quick.  In a couple weeks the
mages would be eager little breeders, their new existence defined by the
blissful cycle from orgasm to orgasm, tiny bodies twitching and groaning
from the thrusting monster cocks as their pregnant bellies began to swell
with cubs.

   It wasn't fair.  It should have been her.  She was the weak one.  Dienna
was mean, but Seri hadn't really wanted that to happen to her.  Nobody
deserved that, to be raped around the clock by enormous bear monsters 10
times your size.

   "We cast wards against as many monsters as we could," protested Val
weakly, still hugging Seri.  "Ursa are rare here.  It's not our fault."

   "It's not our fault.  Not our fault." The commander jeered at them in a
high-pitched voice.  "You and your fucking excuses.  Well whose fucking
fault is it then?  My men?  Battle-hardened by 5 campaigns?  Or is it the
group of little cunts with us, the ones who are supposed to know magic? 
You prance around in your skimpy little costumes flashing your flat tits
and your pussies at us around the clock.  It's no wonder my men are
distracted.  I should have put you all in a whore tent on day one.  Then
maybe you could have used those little mouths to earn your fucking keep!"

   "Don't yell at us!" Seri felt tears running down her face as she
shouted. "You know we can't protect against everything at once!  We have to
go get them, Dienna and Sarithia and the others, before...before they end
up --" She turned her head and buried it in Val's shoulder, weeping.

   "Don't tell me what to fucking do, Seri.  You keep your mouth shut or
I'll stuff it full and put it to a good use for once." The commander made a
rude wanking gesture, and some of the men laughed.  He turned to face his
lieutenants.  "Joel, Anthony.  Put the fires out and get the wagons upright
so we can take stock of what we have.  Then we'll go.  We can't stay out
here any longer."

   Another mage stood up.  Jacqueline, a mage a year older than Seri.  Her
uniform was ripped and torn, exposing her breasts.

   "Aren't we going after them sir?" she asked, a distressed look on her
face.  "We'll need the other mages if we're going to drive off the Monstrum
threatening the town.

   "Fuck no!" The commander shouted, whirling angrily on her.  "Look, if
you little shits can't even feel them coming then maybe you deserve to get
raped by bear monsters.  All you worthless little cunts need a good dicking
anyway to keep you in line.  Maybe thinking about your friends getting
raped in the bear den tonight might keep you more vigilant."

   Jacqueline stood in shocked silence, gripping her staff.  Seri peeked
out over Val's shoulder, sniffling.  For a moment she thought Jacqueline
might lash out, with that defiant look on her face.

   "Do you have a problem with my orders Jacqueline?" asked Varus, his tone
menacing.

   "No sir." Jacqueline said stiffly.

   "Then get to work," Varus snarled.

   The men set to work now that their wounds were healed, following the
orders shouted by their superiors.  In short order they had the wagons
packed again and were ready to move out.  The mages huddled in a cluster in
the center of the formation as they began to march again, gripping their
staffs tightly and scanning the bushy forest with frightened eyes.  Many of
the soldiers kept their weapons out, muttering as they peered into the
gloom between the trees, but nothing else leaped out at them.  They marched
on, following the forest trail until the noontime sunlight was slanting
straight down at them from the green canopy overhead.  Seri looked up,
squinting, beginning to sweat in the mounting heat.  They had come to a
ridge, and as they followed it the forest suddenly ended, opening up to
overlook a narrow valley huddled at the feet of a line of sharp mountains.

   A long series of switchbacks guided their descent down into the valley.
Seri could see the town from here: a close-knit collection of shops and
homes with peaked roofs, all surrounded by a wooden palisade.  The sight
filled Seri with a brief flash of homesickness.  Alara wasn't too different
than Bithnia where she had grown up - the same sturdy wooden homes, the
same line of peaks stretching high from the cliffs overhead, the same
scattered smoke leaking from chimneys and wafting lazily in the midday air
- even the air smelled clean and fresh and carried the scent of crops
growing in the fields.  Seri took a deep breath.  It almost seemed like
home.

   But it wasn't home.  Yurani was all the way on the other side of
Teleria, and nowhere would be home to her without Marcus.  They had come
here to fight, she reminded herself.  Not to sightsee.  Seri shielded her
eyes against the sun and peered at the town as they drew closer.  Despite
the serene landscape, this place was not safe at all.  The palisade was
damaged in several places, hastily mended.  It looked like the townspeople
had begun to dig a trench and line it with spikes too, but they seemed to
have given up halfway through.  It seemed quiet.  Seri had expected more of
the background noise always present in villages: horses and wagons, hawkers
crying their goods, children shouting as they played in the streets and
alleys.  Instead, a foreboding silence seemed to hang over the town.

   The wooden gate opened from the inside as their column approached the
town.  Seri spotted Varus and his lieutenants riding ahead on a trio of
horses, approaching the gate.  Seri struggled to keep up with the rest of
the girls, but she was growing tired.  They had been marching all morning
and afternoon, and she felt spent from the fighting on top of it.

   A hand pushed her rudely from behind.  Seri almost stumbled, and looked
back.  The soldier behind her was old and had an ugly sneer on his face.

   "Keep up, ya little cunt.  Almost there now.  Don't go all tired and
girly on me now.  If I have to carry ya, I'll need ta give you a spanking.
Always keeps my own girls in shape when they're lazy, it does." The
soldier's smile was unsettling, and his eyes crawled over the exposed
curves of her body, as though he was relishing the thought of bending her
over and punishing her.  He turned and spat, then fixed her with a
toothless leer.  Seri shuddered.

   "Don't mind him, another soldier nearby said.  That's how he flirts. 
Not exactly a silver tongue for the ladies." The soldier shook his head,
chuckling.  He was actually handsome, Seri thought, with lanky brown hair.
Young too, maybe 22.

   "Gaerth likes em young," the soldier went on, smirking at the other
man's sour expression.  "Hey Gaerth, what makes you think a pretty little
thing like this would want your wrinkled old cock anyway?  I know we've
been on the road for a few weeks but now that we're finally here I'll bet
you could find a nice lady willing to let you put your grubby fingers down
her bloomers.  For the right price of course.  Probably charge extra for
your ugly mug."

   "Shut yer miserable mud gobber, Belarand," the old soldier grumbled. 
"Never hurts to ask, ya now." He fixed Seri with another unnerving leer,
and she shuddered involuntarily, suddenly acutely aware of how little her
uniform covered up.  "Besides, I know some of her friends who ain't so
high-and-mighty.  Like that little one that made such a squeal when those
bear-things took her.  Right shame, that.  She knew how to use her mouth."
The elderly soldier looked right at her as he said it, and reached down to
make a jacking motion with his crotch.

   Seri rolled her eyes and trotted ahead.  She had managed to avoid most
of the men's attention so far, but now with even fewer girls, she might
find that harder to do.  Men couldn't really help themselves, she thought.
The longer they stayed out here, away from the whorehouses and comfort
girls of the city, the worse they got.  She didn't mind too much, really.
That soldier with the brown hair...he seemed nice enough, if crass.  That
old one though...uh uh.  No way.

   They were approaching the gate now.  Seri could see soot blackening the
wall of the palisade in places - they had burned fires to ward the monsters
off.  It didn't seem like it had worked too well.  The pair of women
flanking the gate on each side looked tired, haggard.  Dirt and grime
blemished their faces, as if they hadn't had the luxury of a bath in weeks.
The curved blades they were resting on their shoulders looked as if they
had been clumsily beaten into shape from sickles, and they had only a dirty
pair of leather jerkins on for protection.

   The commander had already passed through the gate after a brief word
with the guards.  A sergeant was gesturing the rest of them through.  Seri
stayed close to Val and the rest of the mages as they marched into the town
and down the cobbled street that formed the main thoroughfare.

   Something seemed off.  It took Seri a moment of scanning the gathered
crowd to realize what it was - there were almost no men.  Maybe that was to
be expected.  Almost everyone had been conscripted to fight in the
desperate war that they were losing.  Almost everyone left in Alara was
female - farmer's wives and daughters.  Seri looked into their faces as she
passed.  A hard edge of weariness lined their eyes, as though drained from
fighting off all the monster attacks, but a kind of awe was growing as they
watched the troops pass.  Especially the mages.  Seri blushed from feeling
so many eyes on her.  Women.  Children.  A mother heaved her young daughter
up onto her shoulders so the girl could get a good look at their saviors,
the ones able to touch the infinite weave that held the cosmos together.

   "Heroes," Val whispered to her, with a mocking grin, and Seri couldn't
help but smile wistfully.  Some hero she was, uneven able to protect her
battle partner.  But maybe they didn't need to know that.  Seeing the mages
seemed to be brining a spark of hope to the onlookers.  Whispers rushed to
and fro in the crowd, and scattered cheers began to break out.

   A little girl skipping barefoot alongside them came closer to Seri,
wearing a shy smile and a faded blue country dress with a ragged skirt. 
Seri stopped.  The girl eyed her up and down, slack-jawed with awe, as
though she were meeting a princess.

   "Hi," Seri said, donning her best friendly smile.  "I'm Seri.  What's
your name?"

   The girl squeaked, as though frightened that Seri had actually spoken to
her.  She gripped her long blond hair in a tight fist and looked like she
might dart away for a moment, but recovered quickly.  How odd, Seri
thought. She wasn't used to being looked up to, especially by a girl
younger than her.

   "I'm...I'm Alyssia," the girl said, finally managing to force out the
words.  "I live here...with my mom and sister.  She's a baker.  Or at
least, she was.  Now she doesn't do anything."

   "Oh?  Is she hurt?" Seri asked.  She wondered how many of the people
here were nursing wounds from the battles they had already fought.  They
mages good with healing would probably have their hands full here.

   "No, no, she's...uh...well she just lays in bed all day, since Allania
was taken.  She's my sister." The girl looked down, visibly upset, working
a toe nervously between a pair of cobblestones.  "The Org-reh, they got
past the wall one night.  Came in before we could wake up enough people to
beat them back.  They busted down the door of our house and,
well...Allania's bed was nearest the door.  We watched as the big Org
ripped off all her clothes and he...he put his big thingy in her.  I think
he wanted us to watch.  We chased him off eventually once other people woke
up but he took Allania with him.  Are you --" the girl swallowed nervously,
as if afraid Seri would use magic to strike her dead for being so
impertinent.  "Are you going to get her back?  We don't know where the
Org-reh went."

   Seri bent and put a hand on the girl's shoulder.  She looked on the
verge of tears.

   "Shhh, it's ok.  Yes that's why we're here.  You don't have to be scared
of the monsters anymore.  We're going to kill them all and then your home
will be safe again, and we'll get everyone back.  I promise."

   A grateful smile blossomed on the girl's face, but Seri knew her promise
was a lie.  The Monstrum Factorum laid out the Conversion process in
excruciating detail.  Right now Allania was bouncing on an oversized Org
cock in a slave pen somewhere, squealing with pleasure.  Or worse: serving
as living armor for some brute for his next conquest.  There was no getting
her back.  She wouldn't even want to come back, by now.

   But Seri couldn't have stood to see the girl cry.  She patted her
shoulder, offering what comfort she could.  The loose sleeve of her armlet
gently brushed against the girl, who looked at it with astonishment.

   "Can I...can I touch it?" Alyssia asked.  Seri smiled and nodded.  To
the girl, she must have looked like royalty, with the beautiful gossamer
cloth of her uniform girdled by tiny golden chains and stuffed with
sparkling gems.  Alyssia's fingers fondled the silky dreamcloth for a
moment, and she touched a gem on Seri's allocite bracelet then traced her
fingers up to feel the open sleeve.

   "I've never seen anything so...so pretty.  Do they give you this for
being a mage?"

   Seri nodded.  The uniform was beautiful, she had to admit, revealing as
it was.  The sheer garment was artfully constructed, delicate cloth piling
in cut folds on her upper arms and sweeping down to criss-cross in a
complex weave around her top and upper back.  It left the rest of her back
and her tummy bare though, and the skirt was desperately short, but the
silky fabric hugged her hips and flared out in a way designed to accentuate
her feminine features.

   "That would be nice, if I could wear something so beautiful." Alyssia
smiled, and touched Seri's auburn hair, as if amazed at its cleanliness. 
Her own hair looked like it hadn't been washed in weeks.  "Maybe they'll
pick me to be a mage."

   "If you have the spark, they will," Seri shrugged, but secretly she
hoped that Alyssia didn't.  Maybe the girl would turn out to be immensely
powerful - the next Alinayah, someone to give them hope - but she wouldn't
have wished her life as a mage on anyone.  All she had wanted was to stay
with Marcus and start a family with him, and that had been stolen from her.

   Seri masked the sudden pang with a sign and stood up.  She gave the girl
her best smile and waved goodbye, rejoining the flow of troops.  Best not
to fall too far behind and get shoved again.

   She spotted Val just ahead of her and trotted up to walk by her side,
eyeing her friend out of the corner of her eye.  Val was almost as pretty
as Dienna, with deep blue eyes and curly blonde hair that bounced around
her bare shoulders cheerfully, and she was almost preening from the
attention of the crowd.  Despite joking about it, she probably really did
have illusions of being a hero.  She seemed like the type: confident and
strong, but when she wasn't being serious she was the giggly type, ready to
smile or crack a joke or play a prank on anyone she deemed too uptight for
their own good.  When they had bunked together at the academy, Seri had
often stayed up long into the night with Val, swapping secrets by
candlelight and sharing their hopes and dreams.  Val was one of the few
people that Seri had told about Marcus.

   "They look hopeful now, don't they?" Val said, grinning at the crowd as
they passed.  She stuck her arm up and waved slowly as if she were on
parade.  Val loved the attention..

   "Maybe," Seri said.  "They've lost a lot already.  Their friends. 
Family members.  I think they had given up."

   "Well now they have nothing to worry about.  The cavalry has arrived."
Val flashed a wide grin at a family of girls as they passed, as though she
were personally responsible for bringing the might of a hundred soldiers
and a dozen mages to the town.  "We'll beat off the monsters and send them
packing back to wherever they came from.  Right Seri?"

   Seri looked around, taking in the slowly growing smiles, the scattered
cheers, the looks of hope dawning slowly on grubby faces.  Something about
it made her feel sick to her stomach.  Maybe Val was a hero, but she
wasn't. She would never be strong enough.

   "Hey, it's ok." Val drew closer to Seri and touched her arm.  "Don't
worry about it, alright?  Worrying doesn't get you anything.  Don't beat
yourself up over Dienna.  Look, if you watch my back, I'll watch yours, ok?
Nothing will get through us."

   Seri took a deep breath, and forced herself to smile back.  Val's
optimism was infectious.  Maybe they did stand a chance.  She wanted to
believe that.

   Up ahead was the town square.  The soldiers at the front were already
spreading out, standing at attention, waiting for their orders from
commander Varus.  He was dispatching them in squads of 6.

   "Darius, I want you at the eastern perimeter," Varus said, all business.
"The wall's all fucked up there so do what you can to secure it.  Jaleth,
take your men and get us some goddamn food.  These runts must be sitting on
something good.  Maybe they have wine too, something better than the piss
we've been drinking.  If anyone gives you any lip, hit them like they
fucked your sister."

   The lieutenant called Jaleth - a grizzled man with a distant look in his
eyes - saluted Varus and then left with his squad.  Varus looked around,
seeing who he had left, and spotted Seri and Val.

   "Just the two little shits I was looking for," he grumbled.  "The
townspeople are expecting another attack from Chrysilae tonight.  They've
been hit every night this week.  Maybe a couple dozen of the bugs.  They
come in, cause a bit of havoc, and take a few girls back to rape in their
hive.  The usual.  Look, you two know what to do, right?  You have that
stupid little book that tells you everything about them don't you?"

   "Yes sir", Seri said.  "We can erect fields of air to combat the buzzing
sound they make-"

   Varus cut her off with a slash of his arm.  "Great.  Whatever.  Just
don't fuck it up again.  I'm not going to lose a single fucking man tonight
because of your bullshit, got it?  I don't care what you do, but you'd
better get your shit together.  If you were real soldiers, I'd say I'd cut
your fucking balls off if you screw up what should be an easy fight, but
you don't even have those."

   "We'll be ready," Val insisted.  "Just make sure YOUR men are ready.  We
won't be able to fight if the bugs are right on top of us."

   "I know how to do my fucking job, Val," Varus said gruffly.  "We weaken
them when they attack here, then tomorrow we'll clear out the hive.  Now,
at sundown I want you to take position on the wall near the gate.  Thomas
will be in charge over there." Varus looked around at the clear sky and the
distant mountains surrounding them.  "At least the weather will be on our
side.  I hate fighting in the fucking rain.  Dismissed."

   "He's just mad that he lost his fucktoy," Val whispered as they walked
away

   Seri couldn't even crack a smile for Val's attempt to be cheery.  It
just reminded her how she had already failed.  At least tonight would be an
easy victory.  They had the numbers to decimate the bugs when they
attacked. Varus' plan would work.

   She parted with Val and sat herself under the shade of an awning near
the main road, a decent distance from the thickest clusters of soldiers. 
The sun had lingered overhead while they had surveyed the town and assessed
the situation, and now was slowly dropping towards the ridgeline in the
west.  A fresh breeze had ushered in the evening, bringing with it the warm
smells of hay from the fields, of woodsmoke and cooking food and the odors
of sweating horses.  The tink-tink sound of a blacksmith's hammer rang out
like a metronome, the perfect rhythm to underscore the sounds of bustling
activity and men shouting orders at each other.  The town seemed to have
come alive again with their arrival.

   Seri unclipped the tiny blue pack from her belt.  It grew in her hands,
returning to normal size, and she reached inside, then hesitated.  She
wanted to read more of the tome she had stolen.  Its secrets beckoned to
her.  Each time she was about to figure out a little bit more, could
decipher a few more of the mysteries it held.  It was the key to the whole
picture - the Monstrum, where they came from, why they were plundering the
world to rape little girls like her.  She was sure of it.  It all dangled
just barely out of reach, and she knew that with just a little more time
she would be able to finally grasp the truth.

   But there were too many people here.  The tome stood out like a sore
thumb, with its jeweled cover emblazoned with onyx and arcane diagrams. 
The other mages would ask questions she couldn't answer.  Regretfully, she
let the tome slip from her fingers inside the bag and grabbed her Monstrum
Factorum instead.  Nobody would think twice about her studying up before
the battle.

   She pulled the book out.  As always, a faint menace seemed to radiate
from the etched lines of bestial forms engraved all over it.  There was
something a little bit haunting about it, in the vague depictions of
numerous forms entwined together on both covers.  Human bodies, all female,
and others - animals, beasts, monstrosities of nebulous form.  all twisting
together in a vast orgiastic panorama that drew the eye and held it
spellbound.  The eye tended to slide over it, as if too repulsed to make
out specific details, but if you didn't focus too hard you could get a
sense of the whole, of a legion of slender female forms, desperately young,
bodies twisting and bent and locked in every conceivable act of coitus and
vile debasement with ravenous, overpowering creatures.

   It was a familiar sight.  She had spent a great deal of her last few
years studying this book and memorizing every word cover-to-cover.  The
academy has tested her, drilled her on every single revolting detail: how
Org-reh took the youngest girls they could get for slaves, raping them
endlessly for sport and breeding them like cattle, how the Conversion
effect of the Centaurum allowed them to cram their oversized horsecocks
into the vagina of a little girl, how the Arachma snared and bound their
victims in webs, laying eggs in their wombs and letting them birth litters
of thousands of tiny spiderlings to bolster their hives.  It was all
outlined in excruciating detail.

   Seri flipped the snaps that kept the book tightly closed, then dug her
fingers into the thick pages and turned to a chapter at random.  She didn't
need to study Chrysilae.  She had already read that chapter a hundred
times. She flipped the pages idly, then stopped at a full-page illustration
of a floating, fleshy creature with a spherical body dominated by a vast
eye.

   "The Monopticus Decaberrationus, commonly known as the beholder, is an
aberration of nature from a bygone age," the chapter began.  "Full of
hatred, ego, greed, and wanton lust, beholders dismiss all other beings as
beneath themselves.  Only in women and young girls do these monstrosities
see value, treating them as beauteous possessions and mates to be bred for
all eternity.

   "Beholders are solitary and inherently antisocial.  Their hatred and
distrust of each other is even greater than their contempt for other
beings. Beholders will attack and drive off or kill any other beholder it
encounters, and this hostility eventually extends even to its own
offspring. Although it may suffer the presence of its progeny for a time,
once the son begins to manifest its magical powers it will be perceived as
an intolerable threat to the senior beholder's dominion, and be driven off
or killed.  Even though beholders are virtually immortal, the combination
of their long gestational period and the centuries it takes for one to
reach maturity means that adult beholders are blessedly rare.

   "A beholder's spheroid body is eight feet in diameter when fully grown.
What can be called its face is dominated by a large bulging eye sitting
above a toothsome maw with a long, slathering tongue.  From the abomination
-(TM)s bloated body sprout ten eye stalks each approximately four feet in
length.  Despite their wiggling, fleshy appearance and the glaring eyeball
at the end of each one, the stalks are inhumanly strong, capable of
restraining and crushing anything that gets close enough to threaten the
creature.

   "A beholder prefers to fight at a distance, using its greatest weapons:
its eyes.  Each of the stalks is capable of shooting forth a magical ray
with a single effect, while the large central eye is capable of emitting an
anti-magic field against anything that falls in its gaze.  The ten
different types of eye rays that beholders possess are:

   Charm: Dominates the will of the victim, causing them to become enamored
with the beholder
Paralysis: Locks a person's muscles in rigor mortis for as long as the
eye is upon them
Fear: Causes overwhelming panic and terror in the victim
Slow: Slows the movement of a person to half their normal speed
Enervation: Drains the victim of energy, leaving them weak and
helplessly fatigued
Telekinesis: Moves a victim or object with magical force, according to
the beholder's will
Sleep: Causes unconsciousness in a victim for up to an entire day
Petrification: Transmutes the flesh of living creatures into stone
Disintegration: A magical cone that annihilates all matter it comes in
contact with
Death: Instantly stops the heart of its victim

   Seri flipped to the next page.  On it was a pair of illustrations, the
first depicting a beholder laying waste to a legion of soldiers, and the
second showing the beholder in the act of overwhelming a company of young
girls dressed like mages, using its eye stalks to coil about them as they
fled, tripping them and ripping off their scanty clothes.

   "The antimagic field of a beholder's main eye makes the creatures
impossible to fight for a mage.  No amount of combined magical power is
enough to counteract the effect.  Only by physically maiming the central
eye can a magical attack be brought to bear against a beholder.  Getting
close enough to cause this damage is extremely difficult, as the eye stalks
are strong enough to grip and snap the bones of any human close enough to
melee.  The only known tactic with any degree of effectiveness is to employ
a phalanx of hundreds of spearmen, sacrificing most to the powers of the
eye stalks until the main eye is too wounded to be effective, then
following up with a decisive magical attack.  It is not recommended to try
this technique, nor any other, as the complete absence of any data
regarding combat victories against beholders is a strong indication of
their nigh invincibility.

   "Beholders use their disintegration eye ray to carve out their lairs
from solid rock deep in the earth.  The lairs are twisting labyrinths of
tunnels connecting spacious vertical shafts that complement their
levitation abilities and inhibit any invading forces.  The lower levels
tend to house the dungeons and storerooms, while the middle levels are home
to slaves and the upper levels are home to the beholder's treasure rooms,
bedchambers, and harems full of concubines.  Within a beholder's domain he
is as a god, and is worshipped by his concubines and servitors.  Males are
repeatedly dominated by the charming magic of the beholder's eye stalks
until their will is broken, after which they serve as keepers of the
beholder's lair until they fall out of favor and are eaten.  Such slaves
labor endlessly to keep the creature's lair immaculately clean, and tend to
any needs of their master's concubines."

   Seri briefly studied the anatomical diagram of the beholder, which
showed a cross section of the spherical body.  Every organ, bone, and body
part was meticulously labeled.  Subscripted information listed the
beholder's phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.

   "A beholder's treasury is always located on the topmost level of its
lair, accessible only by flight.  They are usually extensive, full of the
accumulated wealth of centuries of plunder.  As a beholder's wealth grows,
it will carve new space upwards into the rock, always keeping its most
valuable treasures on the top level while relegating the less valuable
parts of the hoard to lower tiers.  The promise of fabulous wealth has
lured countless adventures to attempt to invade beholder lairs, but all
such incursions are invariably lethal.  All paths into a beholder's lair
are riddled with pitfalls and traps, both magical and physical, and the
beholder's capacity for cunning and cruelty is most apparent in the
fiendish nature of each snare.  Beholders delight in inventing new and ever
more sadistic designs for their traps.  The lack of data presents a
scholarly impediment here; very little is known about beholder traps
because almost none escape them.  The rare survivors have recounted tales
of magical forces that crush, burn, and maim, false floors, spinning
blades, fields that can cause anguish and destroy the minds of those who
enter, and pits full of living tentacles writhing in filthy sludge that
drag their victims into the depths.  The inability to anticipate the nature
of its traps makes any assault on a beholder's lair incredibly costly.

   While any invading males are slaughtered, females are merely disabled by
the selective nature of the traps.  Any woman or girl so captured becomes
part of the beholder's harem.  Beholders will also actively hunt and prey
upon human populations, capturing as many women as they can to add to their
harem.  Beholders seem to show no preference in the age of the girls or
woman they abduct.  Even newborn babes and old crones find themselves being
plucked away by a beholder or his servants.  Any girl or woman deemed too
homely or too old for the beholder's exacting taste is subjected to dark
magics to sculpt her flesh and make her pleasing to the eye.

   Once a victim is added to the beholder's harem, it attends to her
relentlessly for several days.  A beholder's eye stalks double as the
creature's genitalia, and each stalk is capable of detaching from the main
body to engage in coitus with the victim.  Once separated, a pair of
crablike legs and a spear-like phallus over two feet long and 4 inches
thick are revealed at the end of the stalk, and the stalk itself floats or
crawls to the beholder's newest mate and begins coupling with them.  First,
the stalk locks itself to the pelvis of its victim by using its pincered
legs to wrap tightly around the girl's thighs as it penetrates her.  The
fleshy tentacle is capable of surprising agility and strength, and it will
use its legs for leverage to thrust vigorously into the girl's vagina.  At
the same time, the beholder will use its long, serpentine tongue to explore
the girl's body, slathering grotesque saliva all over her naked body.  The
saliva has an aphrodisiac effect, and greatly enhances the victim's
pleasure.

   Once coupled, the eye stalk fucks the beholder's new mate relentlessly,
never ceasing even after the beholder itself leaves.  A new stalk will grow
on the creature's body within a few days to replace the missing one, so a
beholder is never deprived of the inherent powers of its eyestalks for
long. The ejaculatory emissions of the detached stalk are copious - far
more than the diminutive size of the detached limb would suggest - flooding
the new girl with an astonishing amount of semen.  Beholders seem to
attempt to make up for their low fertility rates with the pure volume of
their emissions, and the ejaculate - thick and gooey with a syrupy
consistency - inevitably leaks out in a slick discharge until it grows into
a puddle under the girl.  Coupled with the mucus that the beholder slathers
all over a girl's naked body with its tongue, intercourse with a beholder
is a very messy affair indeed.

   Conversion is relatively slow, begetting a substantial toughening of the
vaginal walls and muscles while at the same time granting greater
elasticity of all of the girl's orifices.  The effect of the heightened
pleasure gained as the Conversion takes effect may be one of the most
substantial ever observed in a Monstrum species.  A beholder fucks its new
harem girl around the clock until she is delirious from the endless
climaxes, and does not slow until she is pregnant.  This takes a
substantial amount of time - several months at least - during which the eye
stalk never detaches from the girl nor ceases its sexual activity. 
Functioning as an extension of the beholder's will, it can continue its
ministrations even if the beholder leaves its lair.  It is unknown what
autonomy a detached eye stalk will retain if the parent beholder is killed.

   Only once a girl has conceived - confirmed by magical means inherent to
beholder biology, presumably - does the girl gain her first respite.  She
is bathed and dressed by the beholder's other slaves in fine, sheer silks
and opulent jewelry and moved from the rape dungeons up to the beholder's
quarters at the highest level.  It is assumed that only once a girl is
bearing the beholder's seed in her belly does it begin to trust her enough
to allow her access to its inner sanctum.  The harem chambers are lavish
and thoroughly decadent, filled with astonishing examples of the finest
wealth that the beholder has plundered in its career, and the new girl is
welcomed intimately by the harem members as one of their own.  Her new life
begins here, an unceasing succession of delights of the flesh, the
privilege of all harem members that carry the beholder's offspring in their
wombs.  While he is present in the harem, his concubines lavish attention
on him, worshipping with total devotion and begging for him to ravage their
pregnant bodies, which he does enthusiastically by means of his eye stalks.
Their ardor is only slightly dampened when their master is away, and the
concubines will amuse themselves with endless orgies, engaging in
cunnilingus and tribadism and every manner of vile debauchery that can be
conceived.

   The secondary effects of the beholder's Conversion are slow-acting, and
quite astonishing even by Monstrum standards.  An impregnated girl will
slowly regress in age, gaining even greater beauty as she does so, until
her loveliness is perfect in her master's eyes.  Girls have been observed
reverting even to prepubescent ages, as this appears to be the preference
of beholders.  A harem is filled with young girls that appear to be between
8 and 12 years old, each in varying stages of pregnancy and pleasing to the
eye in a manner that defies description.  All girls are dressed by the
beholder's other servants in exotic silks and revealing garments with
lavish jewelry according to the beholder's favor toward them.

   The next page was an artist's rendition of a beholder's bedchamber:
three young girls sprawled on the silken sheets of an overstuffed bed
illuminated by candles, beautiful beyond words, bellies bulging tightly
with their massive pregnancies.  Sheer veils and armlets sufficed for their
only coverings, the rest discarded, and a rich variety of jewelry glittered
from their wrists and ankles.  Gooey runners of thick fluid dripped from
the nether regions of two of the girls, and the third was covered in sticky
mucus lavished on her by the writhing tongue of the beholder hovering above
them.  Seri couldn't help but wonder how much of the picture was a product
of the scribe's overripe imagination and how much was verifiable fact.

   She sighed, her attention beginning to wander.  Girls captured by
beholders never escaped, did not even want to be rescued.  In the few cases
where such a monstrosity had been defeated, subsequent interviews revealed
that most of the girls had been there for centuries, living a life of
unceasing erotic pleasure that defied description.  The beholder
gestational period was slightly over 8 years, and once a girl gave birth
she was subjected immediately to constant rape for months until she
conceived again.

   She knew all this.  Beholders had been one of her main areas of study at
the academy.  She had even tracked down some of the old volumes that
described the creatures, and compiled her notes so they could be given to
the Magisterium and added to the Factorum.  As far as she knew only one
beholder had ever been spotted in Teleria; they were exceedingly rare.

   Seri flipped ahead, thumbing the pages.  Combat, combat...  Tips. 
Anything.  She came up empty.  Just a few more notes about how beholders
were never to be trifled with and retreat was the only recommended course
of action.  It figured.  The scholars could drum up endless pictures of
little girls like her getting raped and impregnated by the creatures, but
had nothing to offer on how to fight them.

   She looked for another chapter, flipping through the familiar pages. 
Flesh Fiends.  Dopplegangers.  Rapewolves.  Minotaurum.  Ettu and Yetta. 
Sleth and Vile Buzzards.  Every one of them a rapacious threat with utterly
unique methods of getting their hands and claws on the bodies of a girl
like her and raping her silly.  How could there be so many Monstrum?  The
variety of species seemed endless, a mystery still puzzling to Seri even
after years of studying them.  How did all these species survive without
females of their own?  How did such species come to be, and why had they
only appeared in the world in the last decade?  Teleria had been at
relative peace before then, a proud, enduring kingdom with a strong
military and economic base.  They had traded with the other kingdoms to the
west, and with the tribal peoples of the east, never anticipating how the
Monstrum threat would come to encroach so completely.

   It was getting too dark to read.  Seri squinted at the pages, wishing
she had a candle.  She could have cast a ball of light for herself, but she
preferred to avoid any more attention from the townspeople right now. 
Finally she gave up and looked up from her book.  The sun had slipped below
the sharp edge of the mountains and a fan of dying rays the color of rust
streaked across the evening sky to strike the flock of purple clouds
overhead.  It was a beautiful sight.  Like home.  The town had grown much
more quiet around her as the people gave up the day's activities.  The
smell of fresh bread lingered on the breeze, and columns of smoke were
beginning to rise from the scattered chimneys.  Warm.  Calm.  An idyllic
vision of a perfect town, but there was a trace of foreboding lingering in
the air.  A threat, hanging over the town and ready to strike.  Seri shoved
her Monstrum Factorum back into her pack and stood up to make her way to
the gate.

   Scattered soldiers called out to each other as they moved into position.
The light was fading fast.  Seri walked up the slope and then climbed the
ladder on the inside of the palisade.  A narrow wooden catwalk hugged the
inside perimeter of the wall.  She saw Val and Jacqueline up here with her,
standing a short distance away on either side.  She nodded to them, then
cast her gaze out over the valley.

   It should be an easy fight.  Just a couple dozen Chrysilae, according to
the townspeople.  A normal human woman didn't stand much of a chance
against one, of course, even if she was well armed.  The buzzing noise they
made got inside your head, vibrated your skull and made you hot like you
had a fever.  The horniness followed immediately after - just a bit at
first, a small itch, heavy breathing, then growing rapidly until it was
totally debilitating.

   But they were mages.  They were prepared.  They knew how to fight the
bugs.  Seri scanned the horizon.  The light was nearly gone now, inky
blackness creeping slowly over the valley.  The line of torches flickered
to life along the sharpened tips of the palisade.  The soldiers nearby
muttered warily, growing uncomfortable from the long wait and fingering the
pommels of their swords nervously.

   It didn't take long.  Once the last of the light had finally fled before
the growing blackness of night, a distant droning sound began out in the
mountains - almost inaudible at first.  Seri would have thought she was
imagining it if she didn't know what was coming.  The sound grew steadily
louder, an insectile hum like swarm of flies, but lower in frequency, a
steady thrum that seemed to beat in time with Seri's pulse and make her
blood run hot.  A small tingle began to grow in her crotch, a steady
drumbeat of need.  She couldn't help but think of Marcus again, how her big
brother's cock would push briefly against her labia before he entered her,
seeking the tiny hole of her little pussy.  How he held her tight in his
strong arms, breathing heavy in her ears as he slowly pushed further inside
her, savoring the tightness of her pussy.  Her muscles twitched
sympathetically, yearning to feel his fat prick stuffed in her cunt again.
He had been her first lover, her only love.  Nobody else had lived up to
him yet.  He had always been eager with her, but also gentle.  Firm in his
desire, but tender too.  She would give anything to feel him moving inside
her right now, his thick cock swelling up with passion and spewing a
firehose white-hot batter straight up into his little sister's womb.

   To her left, Val swung her staff, muttering an incantation.  Immediately
the mounting buzz died off, muffled by a magical wall of air.  Val was good
at those kinds of spells.  Seri wasn't.  She held her staff tightly as she
peered out into the darkness, feeling her breathing slow and the horniness
die away.  A pang of regret took its place, but she shoved it away.  The
monsters were almost on top of them.  She could dream about Marcus later.

   The rising moon glimmered over the fields beyond the wooden wall. 
Squinting into the darkness, Seri finally saw them: dark shapes gliding
through the air, propelled by buzzing wings and with thin legs dangling
underneath them.  Very wasp-like.  It was uncanny how many parallels could
be drawn between Monstrum anatomy and creatures found in the natural world.
So many of them resembled regular beasts, albeit twisted and corrupted into
monstrous forms.  It made her want to sit down with a pile of books,
studying, finding the correlations.  She had been good at those things, and
her instructors had always complimented her on her strong scholarly
instinct.  What was she even doing here?  She was good with books, not
combat magic.  Her grip tightened on her staff as the dark shapes grew
closer, the buzzing growing only slightly louder under the magical
dampening.  They had taught her how to summon bolts of lightning, how to
strike out with fists of invisible force, how to rip with air and burn with
fire and trip with moving earth.  And she had sucked at all of it.

   A spike of icy fear was growing in her chest.  She would have to rely on
the other mages; she couldn't even protect herself in a one-on-one fight.
She'd have to complement their spells with her meager powers any way she
could.  It was all she was good for.  Seri looked over her shoulder at Val,
expecting to see the confident girl returning a sly grin, but instead Val
was looking up at the inky sky with a look of growing horror on her face.

   Magical flares exploded with light overhead, illuminating the night like
flickers of lightning and revealing hundreds of flying forms.  Seri stared
up in shock.  This wasn't a couple dozen Chrysilae.  There were hundreds of
them!  It must have been the whole hive!  The fear swelled in her heart,
verging on terror.  She thought of the girls that had been taken over the
last few months, raped and giving birth around the clock to new bugs to
bolster the hive's numbers.  Now they were all grown.  They had been biding
their time, and now they had all come to finish the job.

   With the last flicker of light, Seri saw the bugs hurtling straight down
towards her like boulders.  They were dive-bombing the palisade.  Seri
screamed and threw herself flat, barely avoiding the massive insect that
slammed through the space she had just been in.  Sharp pincers sliced
through the air and caught on the edge of her hair, jerking her head
painfully.

   Keeping desperate hold of her staff, she rolled to her side and slid off
the catwalk, grabbing the edge and swinging briefly as she lowered herself
to the grass.  Men were running everywhere, shouting orders and screaming,
and lightning arced up into the sky, slung by the mages at buzzing forms
they could barely see.  Twin fireballs exploded in the air directly above
Seri, followed by something large and heavy smashing into the ground
directly next to her head.  Seri looked up from her shaking hands and
screamed again - the soldier was dead from the drop, his eyes staring, neck
snapped.  A Chrysilae must have picked him up.  The bugs were strong enough
to do that and more.

   Fireballs boomed into plumes of flames overhead, deafening her.  Peals
of lightning blinded her as they lanced out everywhere.  There was no
battle line.  No formation.  No holding back the horde of giant wasp-like
bugs that could drop on anyone unseen in the darkness.  Seri squeezed her
eyes shut against the tears and shook her head.  She had never been so
terrified, at least not since that night when defeat at the hands of the
Org'reh seemed so certain.  She forced herself to remember how they had won
that battle, even when it seemed hopeless, and dredged up enough resolve to
take a firm grip on her staff again and stand up.

   She saw the bug at the last second and reacted, slamming a rock-hard
wall of air between it and her.  The creature crashed into it, wings
buzzing angrily.  Seri swung her staff and yelled, folding the air like a
piece of bread, squishing the bug's delicate-looking body between the
invisible forces.  It burst in a dozen places with splatters of disgusting
bug juices.  With a final defiant shout she flung the crumpled body away
from her.  That was one.

   The traditional battle tactics in the Monstrum Factorum called for 3
mages to maintain the wall of air that kept out the buzzing of the bugs,
their ranges overlapping for redundancy.  Two might do in a pinch.  With
only a dozen mages left after losing their sisters to the Ursa, they had
only one for that duty: Val.  Seri kept her head down as she crept up
behind her friend.  Val was chanting, her eyes closed, moving her staff and
concentrating as she fed power to the spell.  It kept constant energy to
maintain.  Seri looked around wildly, then yelped and lashed out just in
time to hurtle an incoming Chrysilae away from Val.  The bug's wings buzzed
angrily, muffled but barely audible.  Seri followed up with a bolt of green
power that slammed into the bug, scorching it.  It flew upwards and she
lost it in the darkness overhead.  If she were stronger she could have
incinerated it.

   She knocked two more bugs away, slowing them with purple fields and then
slamming their squishy bodies with walls of force.  She felt herself
screaming, her cries joining the chorus all about her.  Men yelling as they
died.  Girls wailing.  To her left, Danae was twirling about, swinging her
staff and lashing out with bolts of power each time she spun.  A muffled
buzzing sound came suddenly from overhead and Seri had just enough time to
see the terror on the young girl's face as she looked up straight at the
Chrysilae dropping on her.  It slammed her to the ground, pinning her with
its wasp-like body.  Danae shrieked, the young girl struggling as the bug
used its pincered claws to rip off her scanty uniform and expose the little
11-year-old's naked body.  Seri pointed her staff at the pair, teeth
chattering with fear.  What could she do?  She wasn't precise enough to
lash out and crush the bug without risking taking Danae's head off too.  It
would have to be air.  Maybe she could blow a strong enough gust to knock
the thing off of her.  She began to condense the power, drawing it from the
latent energy that suffused the whole world and using it to wind up her
spell.  The bug was too fast though.  After shredding the scanty coverings
of its prey, it maneuvered to press its abdomen against her bottom, letting
her feel the thick girth of erect bugcock pressing against her nethers. 
Danae struggled, squealing, then shrieked when the bug suddenly rammed all
14 inches worth of its substantial prick straight into her tiny little
cunt, spearing her to the ground.  The little girl's belly bulged
obscenely, deformed around the monstrous prick gutting her insides.

   Seri screamed and ducked, barely avoiding another Chrysilae.  Its thin
legs clutched at the space where her head had been an instant earlier.  She
rolled and loosed her magic in an uncontrolled burst, feeling it thump into
the unseen body.  A splatter of grotesque juices spilled out of the
darkness overhead like a macabre shower, raining down on her.  Bug guts and
repugnant viscera splattered all over her face and belly, warm and still
pulsing.

   Seri froze, reeling with terror and unable to think.  Out of the corner
of her eyes she saw the Chrysilae lift off with Danae, clutching her to its
belly with its insect legs wrapped around her naked body and its turgid
prick still stuffed in her cunt.  A few last explosions boomed overhead,
then petered out.  Too many mages were down.  The bugs were swarming all
over them.  The men were routed.  All around her, silhouetted by the
growing fires, the small forms of her sisters were being bowled over by
buzzing insects, knocked to the ground and pinned, staffs bent and broken
and their delicate clothing ripped apart.  Seri whirled, eyes darting in
terror.  Another mage was down, a Chrysilae perched on her back, holding on
with its delicate legs as she struggled.  It reared back, the dangling bug
prick primed against her nethers, and then thrust in violently.  The little
girl shrieked as she felt the thick shaft of bug meat ram into her.  To
Seri's side, a girl was running, crying hysterically, pursued by the bug
flitting just behind her.  It would let her get to her feet and run a few
steps, then knock her over onto the grass again, toying with its prey
before it raped it.

   She clenched her staff in a white-knuckled grip, scanning the
battlefield.  There.  A small girl was being spitroasted by two of the
large bugs, her tiny body jostled back and forth as one pistoned her from
the rear and another slammed its hard bug prick into her squealing mouth.
Seri forced herself to ignore it - just beyond was their last hope, the
reason any of them were still fighting, the reason her ears still felt like
they were stuffed with cotton that kept that insectile siren song from
overwhelming her.  Val was standing on the palisade catwalk, surrounded by
a few remaining mages.  She was still holding her spell, the air around her
crackling with so much power that her hair was floating in the air as if
weightless.

   Seri ran.  She had to protect Val.  It was their only chance.  If they
couldn't win maybe they could rally in the buildings and at least drive the
bugs off.  Seri's heart raced in her chest and she wasn't sure if the taste
of salty bile in her mouth was her own sweat or the juices of the bugs she
had slaughtered.  She tried to ignore it, to wall it away with her own
desperate fear and the horrifying sights of her comrades falling and being
raped all around her.  She darted around each cluster of bugs, the swarms
gathering around each fallen girl like bees in a hive.  The ones that had
already picked a girl would ignore her, she knew.  She ducked under another
hurtling insect body and rolled on the grass, springing to her feet at a
dead run again.  The mages just ahead were making a good show of it.  They
had formed a line, lashing out with interlocking sprays of lightning that
crackled in the air and held the buzzing fiends at bay.  Maybe they stood a
chance.  Maybe they could still do it.

   She had almost closed the gap when a wasplike form dove out of the
darkness above and slammed into Val like a cannonball.  Seri watched in
horror as Val pitched right over the wall and out of sight.  Acting on
instinct, Seri swung her staff and reached out with her power, grasping at
the invisible strands of Val's spell just before they could dissipate. 
They almost slipped out of her fingers, almost, but Seri held on, drawing
them together again into a functional weave and maintaining the spell
before it could disintegrate.

   Seri was almost shocked.  She wasn't powerful enough to cast such a
spell on her own, but apparently maintaining it was a different matter. 
She struggled to send as much of her own power into it as she could; it was
barely enough.  The other mages lashed out with their lightning to strike
away the bugs that flew at her from all sides.

   "Rally inside the town!" she screamed at them, still struggling under
the weight of the sputtering spell.  "They can't fly around in the
buildings!  We can ward the doors and beat them off!" She ducked and rolled
under a buzzing form that the other girls hadn't caught in time, and the
bug whizzed by harmlessly.  "Come on!" She waved her arms fiercely, and the
other girls jumped down from the wall to surround her.  They began to move
as a group, the girls forming a ring around Seri, casting on the run.  The
line of buildings was only a hundred feet away, flickering a lurid orange
from the spreading flames.  The town was ablaze, but with their magic they
could carve out an area and keep a space free of smoke and fire and wait
out the battle.  It would work.  It had to work.

   Seri's chest heaved and her lungs burned like fire.  Her mind reeled
under the torrent of power needed to maintain the spell.  It was too much -
like trying to hold a boulder over your head with shaking arms.  She only
needed to keep it going a little longer.  Just a little bit.  The buildings
were just ahead, and it looked like the smithy warehouse hadn't caught fire
yet.  The girls ran together, sprinting for the large pair of open doors.

   Something snapped, and the rebound slammed into Seri with a jolt that
took her breath away.  She felt herself slip and fall, gravel scratching
her legs and belly.  The spell had broken as if rent by an outside force.
That wasn't normal.  Spells didn't come apart like that.  Seri shook her
head, trying to remember where she had felt that kind of interference
before - the book.  The one in her magical bag.  She looked down at it in
horror, but was immediately overwhelmed by a powerful buzzing drone that
crashed over her like a wave.

   The sound slammed into her eardrums, drowning out the screams.  Her
skull vibrated with the rhythm, an inexorable, overpowering drone that
throbbed in her brain like a new heartbeat.  She felt her blood rushing,
hot, feverish, her pulse pounding, a torrent of thrumming vitality that
poured through her and left violent shivers in its wake.  She scrabbled on
the ground, feeling drool on her lips.  The energy gushed in her crotch,
turning it into a maelstrom of tingling urgency, and she couldn't help
herself - her fingers dipped on their own, pushing between her legs and
digging straight into the sopping hole of her sex.  She shrieked
immediately, a deafening orgasm exploding in her brain, washing out all
other thoughts.  She rammed her fingers violently inside her pussy,
thrusting as deeply as she could go.  It was like every lover she had ever
had at once, every pulsing cock that had squeezed its way into her tiny
pussy and left a sticky gush of juices inside.  The pleasure slammed into
her, shaking her body from head to toe.  Flashes of light exploded behind
her eyes.  The walls of her cunt sucked desperately at her fingers,
twitching with ecstasy.  Her mind whirled.  She was drowning in the buzzing
drone that coated her consciousness like heavy syrup.  She felt arms around
her.  Strong.  A lover's arms.  Marcus, her wonderful brother.  He was here
with her, at last, his thick prick pushing at the folds of her labia,
lining up and ready to penetrate his little sister again like she had never
left.  Seri twitched and gibbered with passionate anticipation.  Fuck me,
big brother.  Ram your cock into your little sister's cunt and flood me
with cum.  I want your babies.  Please --

   He pushed inside, and Seri screamed with pleasure.  He was so big!  The
thick, veiny rod of pulsing meat throbbed like molten steel inside her, the
massive girth stretching her quivering cunt to the breaking point.  His
arms stretched around her belly, his fingers brushing her shoulders and
hips, making her tremble everywhere.  Another climax erupted inside her
like a volcano, and she heard herself howling, distantly, as she felt a hot
river of goo splash up against her cervix.  Her big brother's semen, his
gift to her, the seed that she had always prayed would grow in her belly.
The stiff rod managed to swell even more tightly in her cunt, plugging it
up, forcing the spew of juices deep into her womb.  Seri floated in a
stratosphere of bliss, imagining the billions of tiny sperm swimming inside
her, seeking out her eggs, ready to fertilize her with her brother's child
at last.

   Seri gibbered as the static of her orgasm slowly dribbled away.  Sharp
gravel was cutting into her arms and legs.  Had Marcus taken her out in the
fields again?  All she wanted was to stay out here all day with him, making
love to him and taking his seed inside her.  She opened her eyes and looked
up.

   The crackling blaze of a burning town greeted her.  Distant screams
echoed across the night, some coming from the darkness overhead.  A body
was on top of her, three pairs of segmented arms locked around her belly,
buzzing with delight as its turgid cock squished in her sloppy vagina.

   Seri screamed as the ground fell away beneath her.  The Chrysilae was
lifting her up, holding her to its abdomen with its thin, waspy arms.  She
struggled and reached out desperately, but her staff was already far below
her, sitting uselessly out of reach on the gravel.  Seri howled and
struggled, then stopped as their height increased.  The town spun
underneath her, dropping away.  The bug held her locked tightly to it,
still thrusting into her cunt as it turned and began flying into the
darkness of the night.  Seri could barely see anything.  The only light was
coming from the amber inferno below where the town was burning to the
ground, but she could just barely see other forms in the darkness: a flock
of monstrous bugs, each clutching a weeping, unseen victim to its belly. 
Women.  Girls.  The townsfolk.  Her mage sisters.  All of them, taken. 
Beaten.  They had lost utterly, and Seri knew in exquisite detail just what
happened to mages that lost their battles and were taken by the enemy. 
With growing horror, she realized that the hot swill she could feel burning
in her belly was just the beginning.

   They were being taken to the hive.



   ~*~

   Seri's muffled shriek died away as another firm prick rammed itself into
her sloppy mouth and plugged it up.  She could feel the sticky legs of the
enormous insects all over her body.  The bug in front of her clutched its
arms tightly around her head and began thrusting, its bulbous abdomen
slapping into Seri's face.  She tried to scream, tried to struggle, but it
was useless.  It had been hours since they had taken her into the hive. 
The Chrysilae carrying her had raped her enthusiastically several times as
they flew, ejaculating its bug juice inside her until a sticky river of goo
was running out of her cunt and dripping down into the darkness.  Seri had
thought the nightmare couldn't get worse, right up until the point where
they flew into an oblong opening and into a warren of twisting, chaotic
tunnels.  It reeked of bile and bug juices, and the echo of girlish wailing
resounding off the resin of the tunnels formed an eerie chorus that struck
a new fear into Seri's heart.  The bug had flown until it found a free
cell: a gooey hexagon, open on both sides.  Freshly extruded by the
workers. It had dropped her unceremoniously, and she had landed with a plop
on a pile of sticky sludge that stuck to her belly and breasts like syrup.

   Then they had got to work.  There seemed no end to the bugs.  They
swarmed like bees, crawling all over her and the other girls she could see
around her.  The cells were stuck at every angle in a chaotic network, each
one holding a fresh girl like herself.  Before Seri could even pull herself
out of the slop, a Chrysilae had landed on her back, wrapped its three
pairs of disgusting insect legs around her waist, and slammed itself home
into her exposed cunt.  Seri had gibbered.  She had begged.  She had cried,
and it meant nothing to the cold, alien gazes of the insects as they thrust
their meaty bug pricks deep into her holes.  They weren't too picky - she
could feel as much semen dripping from the her gaping asshole as her cunt,
and her stomach ached from the volume of sticky fluid she had had to
swallow to avoid choking.  The bug in her mouth rammed forward violently,
flattening her tongue on the bottom of her mouth and lodging its glans deep
into the tight tunnel of her throat.  Seri instinctively tried to pull up
her hands, to slap them futilely against the belly of the creature, but she
couldn't: the gooey juices excreted by the disgusting little sacs on the
bugs coated her body, hardening everywhere rapidly.  Her arms were already
stuck, shackled at the wrists.  She couldn't move her waist anymore.  Her
feet were encased.

   She forced down her scream and closed her lungs, forcing herself to
swallow.  Immediately a thick torrent of salty juice gushed into her throat
from the pumping bug prick.  She felt the river of warm insect semen slide
down her throat, joining the ocean in her stomach.  Her belly felt
distended, bulging from the internal pressure of so much spunk sloshing
inside of it.  She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to swallow as fast as she
could, so he would finish.  The world was going even darker.  Her lungs
burned for air.  Dizzily, she felt the last pulses of the bug's
ejaculations vibrating in her throat, and he finally pulled out.  Seri
coughed roughly as the the thick bug phallus left her mouth, expelling gob
after gob of syrupy mucus that dribbled down her lips and chin.

   The air burned her lungs like razorblades as she inhaled.  Precious air.
She would have only a few moments before another wasplike Chrysilae buzzed
up and, finding the little girl's mouth unoccupied, slammed its cock home
inside.

   The bug clutching her waist thrust deeply inside, and its body began to
hum.  Lightning pulses of pleasure began to race up Seri's spine.  The
revolting hum seemed to resonate inside her, matching her racing heartbeat
and the jerking rhythm of her cunt, amplifying it as if by magic.  Despite
herself, Seri squealed with pleasure.  The bugs enjoyed thrusting but when
they were ready to cum they usually did this: burying their fat bug pricks
deeply inside and treating her body to a mounting tide of vibrating
ecstasy. It was shocking how good it felt, how that insect buzz hummed so
deeply inside her belly, building with a fierce energy, a primal, electric
beat that swelled like a crescendo in every cell of her body.  Seri could
feel her orgasm rising like a tsunami, higher and higher, ready to crash
over her - and still it rose, elevated by the impossible jolting rhythm of
that bug prick buried against her cervix and tickling it so deliciously.

   Seri screamed as she her climax exploded inside her.  Nothing had
prepared her young body for this, for the raw, animal pleasure of her
nonstop rape.  She twitched in her bonds, head thrashing, howling.  A
sticky torrent of filthy bug juices erupted inside her, and Seri threw her
head back, exulting in the hot flood spewing deeply into her womb.

   Distantly, she felt a fresh feeling of runny goop gush out over her
buttocks - the excretions of the bug's fluid sacs, sucking up her own
juices and transforming them into a rapidly-hardening sludge.  Her orgasm
strobed in her brain, her battered consciousness quivering like a lightning
rod struck by the storm.  She convulsed madly.  The hurricane of ecstasy
whirled in her brain, just barely beginning to taper away after what seemed
like an eternity of bliss.

   The insect on top of her pulled its meaty bug prick out of her with a
plop and buzzed away, apparently satisfied.  Seri shook her head, senses
still reeling.  She tried to move her hips experimentally, but the goop had
hardened like mortar around her, encasing her tightly.  The last blast of
resin against her naked ass had sealed up even her cunt, solidifying inside
her labia like a cork.  It meant they were done with her, at least for now.
The resin would keep the copious amount of bug cum they had spurted into
her belly sealed up tight, where it was sure to impregnate her.

   Seri raised her head as much as she could and looked around.  The dim
light of the hive - a sickly amber that pulsed as if alive - illuminated
the myriad of identical cells, almost all of them crawling with bugs.  The
reeking stench of acrid bug juices filled her sinuses, and the droning song
of hundreds of girls like her thrummed in her ears - girls wailing, crying
out repeatedly in the throes pleasure as the Chrysilae climbed over them
and impaled them with their throbbing bug pricks.  So many.  The whole
town. Her mage sisters.  Hundreds of tender bodies shuddering under the
power of that overwhelming orgasmic hum, open wombs ready to accept the
insect semen spewed inside them, bellies growing fat with pregnancy until
they birthed more young to bolster the hive's numbers.  More Chrysilae.  An
army of them, spreading out like a plague, kidnapping ever more girls and
bringing them back to this monstrous hive to fill with seed.

   Seri hung her head, tears coming to her eyes.  The same seed that was
flooding her womb right now.  Billions of insect sperm, swimming about and
seeking her eggs.  The same sludge that encased her was already working its
insidious Conversion effect on her.  Maybe it was her imagination, but she
thought she could almost feel it already: the yearning desire to feel those
segmented insect legs brushing her naked skin, the flutter of the bug's
feelers, its thick bug cock probing her delicate little pussy, seeking the
opening, ready to ram itself inside and fill her with insect juice.  Seri
shuddered, trying to deny the vision.  Was this really her fate?  How had
it come to this?  She had always imagined herself growing up on the farm,
her belly growing fat once Marcus' seed finally caught inside her, and then
raising their babies as a happy family.  Now she would grow fat alright:
her belly would swell with a swarm of vile insects until she birthed her
monstrous younglings, only to be raped and impregnated again and again in
an endless cycle.  She could feel the bug juice marinating inside of her.
It would change her womb, increasing its temperature and size, making it
suitable for insect spawn.  It wouldn't take long.

   No.  Not her.  Seri shook in her bondage, thrashing.  Her hair jerked
against her scalp painfully where parts of it were stuck to the gooey
resin. Not her.  Anyone but her!  The tears welled up inside her and she
began to cry.  This couldn't be the end.  Not like this.  Not a host for
insect babies.  It couldn't end like this.  Tears dripped from her eyes and
ran down her cheeks, congealing with the splatters of bug semen and gunk
that coated her face and whole body.

   It was useless.  The stuff was too hard.  She was locked up tight,
barely able to move her body.  Seri forced herself to stop, forced her
breathing to slow.  Eventually she was able to stop sniffling.  The bugs
were leaving her alone for the moment, apparently content now that she was
encased in resin with a tightly plugged pussy holding the ocean of bug
sperm inside.  She could hear them raping the other girls around her, but
it wouldn't last long.  They would be back, ready to have more fun with her
mouth and ass, ready to enjoy her wiggling little human body.  Once they
had built out their hive, the Chrysilae workers didn't have much else to do
other than enjoy the prey they brought back.

   It was now or never.  Seri forced down her panic and tried to think. 
Her staff was back in Alara, lying on the grass - assuming it hadn't been
destroyed or burned up, anyway.  She couldn't cast without a staff - nobody
could.  The elder mages hadn't needed staffs at all, but their secrets had
long been lost to humankind.  If she was to get out of this, she'd need to
find another way.  She jerked her hands, but her wrists were still locked
tight.  If only she had her magic.  Just a single spell.  Just a little
burst of power.  Something --

   Seri jerked as the thought hit her.  Of course she had something.  All
mages did, when they were wearing their uniforms - the gems.  They were
carefully cut by skilled artisans, each one flawless.  They cost a fortune,
though the magical dreamcloth cost even more.  But unlike dreamcloth, the
matrix of a gem could hold a small trickle of power for a time - a kind of
inductance, more potent the more pure the gem was.  They would accumulate a
small amount of any magical power channelled nearby, and Seri had spent all
evening in the presence of a tremendous amount of magical energy --

   She looked around again - she was still being ignored.  She had only a
short amount of time.  Normally she would use the gems to bolster magical
energy for a spell as she condensed it, but without her staff she couldn't
draw power from the weave at all.  She didn't need to condense the energy
in the gems though - it was already there.  All she had to do was channel
it and unleash it.  She reached out, carefully, feeling tentatively with
her senses.  Very little of her uniform was left, most of it having been
slashed away.  Her skirt had been rent to pieces, but her belt was still
intact, along with the tiny bag that hung from it.  Her waist was encased
in resin, so she couldn't see, but she felt carefully with her senses
--there.  A tiny trickle of power.  The ruby just below her navel.  It was
a big one.  It still pulsed with power from the battle.

   Carefully, like picking a lock, Seri coaxed a tiny tendril of magical
energy from the unseen gem.  She'd only get one chance at this.  She
spooled the power like a thread, coiling it upon itself and then pulling it
into a simple weave - heat.  An easy spell that took little power.  She
could feel it building up all around her.  Her skin began to grow hot and
tingle from the radiating energy.  Seri bit her lip to keep from moaning as
the discomfort grew.  She was sweating, but it was working: the resin was
slowly melting like candle wax, becoming just pliable enough that she could
begin to wiggle.  She worked her hands first, jerking them tightly under
her left hand was free, then her right.  She reached down, clawing with her
nails at the resin at her waist.  It began to come away in sticky handfuls
of foul-smelling granules.  Just a little bit more...she could move her
hips a tiny bit now.  She resisted the urge to make a lot of noise by
thrashing, instead working herself free inch by inch like a worm emerging
from a cocoon.

   At last she slipped, dropping out of the runny hole and landing with a
splatter on the slick floor of the hive.  She was free!  Seri almost
whooped with joy, but clapped a hand over her mouth.  A thick band of
jellied goop still coated her waist and private parts.  Bug semen glistened
all over her - on her arms, coating her flat breasts, spurted haphazardly
all over her thighs.  She flicked the worst of it away, then peeked over
the mound that had kept her restrained until moments ago.

   The tunnels twisted haphazardly, following no pattern comprehensible to
a human mind.  She supposed it made sense to the bugs.  There were other
girls nearby, howling, gnashing their teeth, then squealing in climax as
the bugs raped them.  Keeping her head low, Seri crawled to the next mound,
then the next one beyond that, praying to the gods that the bugs wouldn't
notice her.  The couple dozen she could see from here seemed to be keeping
busy, enjoying themselves as they plundered the bodies of the little human
girls they had captured.  Seri crept by them, knowing that the bugs could
see in the gloom of the hive better than she could.  All it would take was
a peek around a corner at the wrong time, a stumble on the slick juices
running off her naked body, and they would be all over her again.  She
wouldn't get any second chances this time.

   Somehow she made it past the bulk of the bugs to the oblong opening that
led into a wider corridor.  She moved from her hands and knees to a crouch.
Cautiously, she peered around the corner.  The tunnel twisted as it rose.
Seri had no idea which way was out, but she figured upwards was better. 
She began to climb, trying desperately not to slip on the smooth, rolling
surfaces of the hive walls.  They were made for flying through, not for
human hands and feet.  How long had the bugs been here, patiently digging
out their hive, kidnapping human girls from the nearby towns to breed and
bolster their numbers?  Quite a while, she thought.  The hive seemed large.
She came to a fork and chose the left way.  Maybe the townsfolk were stupid
and had thought the disappearances were due to more mundane circumstances,
like plain old murder.  Maybe they hadn't called for the mages until it was
too late.  Or maybe they had called right away.  There were too many
townships under threat these days, and too few mages and soldiers left. 
Seri didn't know how long the villagers' cries for help had gone
unanswered.

   And now here they were, hopelessly lost, their bodies and wombs forfeit
to their new bug masters.  Seri passed a chamber and peeked carefully over
the twisting, slimy curve of wall.  Inside were two women - well, one women
and a child, anyway.  They both were playthings for the half dozen bugs
that crawled all over them.  Between the buzzing wings and thrusting insect
bodies Seri caught the face of one of the women: it was one who had held
her child on her shoulders to watch the mages pass when they had arrived,
hope and pride on her face.  What a fool she must feel now, Seri thought.
The mages - undertrained, undersupplied, and undersupported, had been
thoroughly beaten, and she would be the one to pay the price.

   The woman's daughter was cocooned next to her.  How nice of the bugs to
cocoon families together, Seri thought darkly.  The naked little 6-year-old
struggled and screeched as a Chrysilae worked to wedge its fat prick into
the girl's tiny pussy.  The lips of her bald, glistening cunt stretched out
widely, straining to contain the thick girth of greasy bug phallus slowly
pushing into her.  Conversion.  It was already working on the girl's body
rapidly, cocooned as she was in sticky resin.  Increased vaginal elasticity
and sensitivity accompanied almost all first-tier Conversion effects.  The
buzzing insect gripping her body with its segmented legs was the little
girl's first lover, the slimy bug cock entering her cunt her first sexual
experience.  She'd have plenty more of those now, Seri knew, as the bugs
raped her and her mother around the clock, filling them with spurt after
spurt of hot sticky bug juices until their bellies began to bulge with
insect larvae.  More soldiers for the hive.

   Seri clapped her hand over her mouth and crept past.  She couldn't help
them.  All she could do was get out.  She tasted bile on her tongue, and
this time she was sure it wasn't the salty leavings of the bug semen that
had been spewed in her mouth.  If she could just get out of here.  If she
could just get back to civilization.  There were so few mages left now, but
she'd find a way.  She'd go to her commanders.  She'd go to the
Magisterium, or all the way to the queen if she had to to get them to
muster the forces necessary to retake the region and rescue all the girls
here.

   Past the chamber, the tunnel began to circle as it climbed.  Seri crept
up cautiously, trying not to make a sound.  Distant, breathy wails echoed
off the slick resinous walls - the multitude of women and girls being raped
and impregnated by the scuttling bugs drumming through the walls like the
heartbeat of the hive.  The slope became steep, and Seri had to use her
arms to pull herself up each uneven segment of the hive wall.  She was on a
higher level of the hive now - hopefully closer to the exit.  A cool breeze
whispered against the sticky juices on her bare chest.  Yes, she was
getting closer.  Just a little farther to go now until she found a way out.

   She gasped and ducked quickly behind a purple protrusion when the
passage opened into a small chamber.  A thick pillar of resin encased a
hexagonal cell on one side of the space, and a trio of bugs were feverishly
working their erect pricks into a girl embedded within.  Like all the
girls, the gooey bug fluids had hardened into tough restraints that circled
her waist, leaving her genitals and torso exposed.  Seri risked a peek, and
saw the girl's head bobbing crazily as the bug over her face vigorously
thrust its abdomen, ramming a hefty girth of pulsing insect cock deep into
the girl's mouth.  With a final thrust the Chrysilae buried its prick in
the little girl's throat, and Seri saw her swallowing madly as she
desperately sucked down the firehose of bug semen, trying not to choke.

   Two other bugs were working the girl at the other end, railing the
girl's pussy and anus at the same time with their imposing pair of
throbbing bug pricks.  The first bug, having finished in the girl's mouth,
buzzed away, and flew straight towards Seri.  She managed to avoid a squeak
as she ducked further behind the mound that obscured her, and the bug flew
right past her down the passage without noticing her.  She breathed a sigh
of relief, and peeked into the chamber again.  The two bugs still raping
the girl were mostly on the far side of the cell.  They wouldn't be able to
see her.  She could sneak past.

   Quietly, trying not to slip as her bare feet touched puddles of sticky
goop on the floor, she moved in.  The girl had gone slack as her body was
jolted by the powerful thrusts, her head lolling.  Seri moved closer.  The
exit was just on the other side.  She'd have to pass by.  The dull amber
light of the hive wasn't much to see by, but as Seri passed near the girl
she almost cried out in shock.  There was no mistaking that long blonde
hair that she envied or those brilliant blue eyes.  It was Val!  Her head
was hanging upside down, her eyes glazed from repeated orgasms, and
trickles of drool and foul-smelling bug semen oozed from her lips.  Seri
clapped both hands over her mouth.  It was more than she could bear, seeing
her friend like this.  Val's tongue hung from her mouth and a low moan was
growing in her throat, rising in pitch as waves of pleasure shuddered
visibly up and down her naked body.

   Val began to jerk and shudder, thrashing in her bonds as the slamming
bug pricks brought her to another shrieking climax.  Seri watched in
horror. She had seen this before, of course - illustrated with lavish
detail on the pages of her Monstrum Factorum - but watching it happen to
her friend right in front of her almost made her scream.  Val howled with
ecstasy, exulting as her bug captors spewed a twin flood of sticky insect
seed up inside her womb and colon simultaneously.  Seri wretched in
sympathy, feeling the tingling in her own body from the same bug swill
oozing in her own womb, dripping down her legs, melting in her stomach.

   The bugs were done.  They'd fly away in a moment, and more would be here
right after, drawn by whatever pheromone signals told them a little girl
wasn't being raped right at that moment.  They'd keep coming until they
were satisfied they had dumped enough cum in her to make her pregnant, then
they'd seal up her pussy too.  Just another womb for the hive.  It would be
Seri too, if she was caught.  If they saw her.  She'd end up just like Val,
a squirming little cum dumpster taking slick bug penises around the clock,
her belly growing hot and tight as it blossomed with the larvae growing
inside.

   Fear choked her throat.  Throwing caution to the wind, she turned and
fled up the tunnel



   ~*~



   Seri shivered tightly as she cupped the water and poured it over
herself. The summer night was chill for a naked girl, but not unbearable.
Even as cold as it was, the water of the pool felt like a balm as she
washed off the mishmash of gooey fluids that coated every inch of her body.
Her face and neck.  Her flat breasts.  Her waist, her thighs.  And of
course her genitals.  She tackled them all, then crouched to dunk her head
again, pulling yet more tacky gunk out of her hair.

   It had been a miracle that she had escaped unseen.  The bugs probably
wouldn't notice.  What was one pussy less, among hundreds?  They would have
their fill of fresh cunt for a long time, filling each one to bursting with
their seed before sealing it up with resin to wait.  Seri reached down,
feeling the hard resin plugging up her vagina.  It would be hard, but...she
had to.  With a grunt, she managed to work a finger in, barely squeezing it
between the hard plug and the quivering wall of her pussy.  Her muscles
ached after being pounded for so long, dozens of bug cocks, maybe hundreds.
It was hard to keep count when delirious from so many orgasms.  Her warm
finger sparked a tingling sensation, a shivering flash that didn't come
from the clammy water.  She swallowed, her throat dry.  It had felt so
good. Why had it felt so good?  When the bugs had been crawling all over
her, brushing her with their thin, waspy bodies, ramming hard prick after
hard prick into every one of her orifices, she had lost herself like a
storm-tossed ship, cresting the waves from orgasm to orgasm and coasting in
bliss.  She thought she understood now, maybe just a little bit, why the
girls...why they might not want to come back.  Why they might want to stay
there in the hive.  Seri looked up at the dark line of mountains where the
hive lurked, where all those girls were doomed to a paradise of sexual
bondage.  Bug pricks, slamming home in every hole.  Seri licked her lips
unconsciously.  She could have it again.  Maybe, just maybe --

   She shook her head to banish the thought.  She wasn't going back.  She
wasn't going to end up as some sessile little fucktoy for buzzing insects.
Digging her finger in farther into her own pussy, she jerked at the thick
plug of resin, finally managing to dislodge it.  It tumbled from her gaping
pussy to land in the pool with a plop.  It was just the Conversion
effect...wasn't it?  Yes, that was it.  A thick, runny sludge began to ooze
out of her cunt, which felt deflated after the exit of the hard mass.  Seri
ducked into the pool again to wash it all away.  So much bug semen.  It
just kept flowing out, like syrup, still warm.  Just the Conversion.  That
was all.

   It took several minutes before she finally decided to move on.  She
didn't feel clean.  Knowing how much vile bug sperm had been bottled up
inside her, desecrating her womb, she'd never feel clean again.  She had
run for a long time before stopping at this pool, almost all the way back
to Alara.  She could see it in the valley just below.  The fires seemed to
have burned themselves out by now, though scattered columns of smoke spoke
of smoldering ashes.  Many of the buildings were little more than charred
skeletons, standing like bitter monuments to defeat in the slowing growing
light of the dawn.

   A light breeze added to her chill as she descended towards the town. 
The remains of her uniform - just shredded remnants of her skirt and left
armlet - dripped clammily against her naked skin.  She crossed her arms
against her chest, rubbing them as she shivered.  She had to keep going.

   Eventually she reached the gate.  The wooden doors were mere splinters
dangling from their hinges.  The wooden palisade stood tall and unburnt -
for all the good that had done them against flying enemies.  Seri entered
the town, her bare feet crunching on the gravel path - just a tired,
shivering, naked little girl.  Not the magic-wielding champion she had been
hailed as yesterday.  The breeze swirled through the empty lanes and
burned-out houses, and Seri tasted ashes on the breeze.

   Tears came to her eyes, but she wiped them away.  She had to be strong.
There was nobody else to rely on, nobody to help her.  Marcus had always
been strong.  He had never needed to rely on anybody.  She took a deep
breath.  She had to be like him.  She had to, if she ever wanted to see him
again.  She had always been the youngest, always the smallest, always the
weakest, but rather than bully her like her other brothers, he had always
made time for her, always built her up and helped her be better than she
was.

   She managed to pull herself together and keep moving.  She was
approaching the grassy meadow near the palisade where she had fought the
night before.  She walked across the battleground warily, taking in the
burned patches of ground, the broken bug bodies, the scattered groups of
soldiers that had died fighting.  Only men's bodies.  No mage bodies, of
course.  Monstrum always had other plans for them.

   It had to be here.  It had to.  Or if not it, then another.  Seri kicked
aside a broken shaft of wood with her bare toe.  Smashed and splintered
staffs.  Small strips of gossamer clothing blowing in the grass like
scattered leaflets.  Brown bloodstains.  The evidence of their defeat.  But
where was it?

   Her heart skipped a beat when she crested a small mound and saw it - her
staff!  She skipped forward and yanked it off the ground.  The cool length
of smooth ash with the sapphire A'sham on it was miraculously intact.  Seri
swung it around, feeling the swirls of magical energy return like life
itself.  She laughed with joy, giddy.  They hadn't destroyed it!  It was
like a miracle.  Seri swept the energy into herself, condensing as much of
it as she could, clutching it like a drowning man with a life preserver. 
It brimmed inside her, a torrent, a wild rush of splendid power and
sensation bursting with the vitality of the cosmos itself.  Her naked body
seemed to hum, warming immediately from the innate energy.

   She had been holding her breath.  She let it out in a rush, letting all
the fear and tension go with it.  She had her staff.  She had her magic. 
She wasn't very strong, but nothing - NOTHING - was going to separate her
from her staff again.  She wasn't going to be helpless.  She was going to
get out of this after all.

   The thought of fleeing immediately was incredibly tempting, but Seri
felt the pull of her duty.  She had to at least check out the town so she
could deliver an accurate report to the Magisterium.  Her entire company
beaten.  The whole town burnt to the ground.  Hundreds of new wombs claimed
by a previously unknown hive.  After this, she would be disgraced.  What
company could they even assign her to?  Who would even agree to fight with
her?  Nobody, she hoped.  Maybe they would even send her home.  If the gods
were kind...

   Seri swept her staff and formed the energy into a warm flow that she
directed inside herself.  Revitalization.  It would keep her going a little
while longer, protect her feet from any more cuts, keep the chill of the
breeze at bay.  Then she turned and walked down the main thoroughfare into
the town.  A few buildings were intact, but most had lost at least one wall
to the fire, and a few had burnt badly enough that their roofs collapsed.
She passed the smithy and the grocer, barely recognizable.  A wooden sign
creaked wistfully overhead, its logo blackened and obscured by soot.  This
must be the inn.  The windows were broken out, shards of glass scattered on
the cobblestones.  Was there nothing left?

   Seri turned, heading for the outskirts again.  She wouldn't find
anything this way.  She formed the weave for a spell that she didn't know
well.  Divination was surprisingly tricky, one of the many things she was
not strong in, but maybe it would help.  She kept walking, passing the
empty buildings of what was now a ghost town, until she felt a
brief...something.

   She stopped, and turned.  Peering down an alley.  Hmm.  Was it just the
whisper of the wind?  The dark passage between the buildings was narrow,
but she was little enough to fit.  The wooden walls on both sides were
charred but still intact.  Seri squeezed through, keeping her staff in a
tight grip until the alley let out into a wider yard at an intersection
with two other buildings.

   Yes...there was definitely something.  A vague tingling.  A stirring. 
Somebody was alive.  Seri sniffed as she scanned the area, then spotted a
pair of blackened cellar doors nestled next to the wall of the far
building. She crossed the yard and tugged them open.  A ladder stretched
down steeply into the darkness.

   Casting light for herself, she swung herself down onto the ladder and
descended.  It was musty in here, but it seemed to have escaped the fire.
She reached the bottom and turned around.  It was a small cellar, lined on
one side by masonry and by wooden boards on the rest.  They had probably
stored cheese in here, judging by the shelves and the smell.  But it was
empty now.  Seri swung her staff around, sending the ball of light on a
circuit of the room.  Her spell was quivering inside her.  Someone was
definitely here.

   "Hello?" she called out.  The darkness was silent.

   "Come on out.  I know you're in here.  I'm not going to hurt you. 
You're safe."

   With her uniform in tatters, she probably looked more like a vagabond
than a mage, Seri thought.  But the staff and the light were obvious. 
Hearing a faint shuffle, Seri crossed the room to the far wall and peered
through the slats of the boards.

   "Eeeeek!" A girl screamed.  Seri caught a flash of eyes and dirty hair
in the space beyond and she heard scuffling.  A girl started crying. 
Multiple girls.  How many were back there?

   "Hey!  It's ok!" Seri bent and touched her fingertips to the slats. 
"I'm a mage.  See the light?  It's going to be ok.  Are you hurt?"

   More scuffling and crying ensued.  They sounded terrified.  Seri huffed.
She didn't have time for this.  Stepping back, she wove a brief spell,
forming a field that would break down the bonds in the wood.  The boards
crumbled into dust before her eyes.

   Now she could see them: 4 terrified little girls huddled in a crawlspace
in the wall, clutching each other and crying.  Tears streaked tracks
through the soot on their faces.  Had they been here all night?  Seri could
just imagine someone hiding these girls down here, nailing up the boards
behind them so the bugs wouldn't be able to get to them.

   With a twist of her staff, she formed a weave and sent the flaring
energy into the girls.  Something to calm them.  Something to warm them, to
take away their hunger and their fear.  It seemed to work.  Their sniffling
died away and their chests stopped hitching.  Seri ducked again to look
through the opening.

   "It's ok.  You'll be fine.  Come on out of there."

   Silently the girls obeyed, crawling one by one from the dark hole into
the light.  Seri swept the light around so she could get a good look at the
first girl, and gasped: it was Alyssia, the star-struck little 9-year-old
Seri had met when she first entered Alara.  Her blue dress was burnt and
ripped and her hair was filthy with soot.  She seemed to recognize Seri.

   "Did...did you beat them?" She asked timidly, shrinking, as if still
afraid Seri might disapprove of her impertinence.

   "No." Seri shook her head.  "But I got away.  Just like we're all going
to get away.  We can't stay here."

   The next girl had crawled out and stood up.  She looked about 12, Seri's
own age.  She had curly hair and olive eyes held wide open with fear as she
looked around the cellar, as if afraid the bugs might swoop in somehow at
any moment.  Out of the tunnel behind her crawled two more figures, a bit
smaller, each with long hair and short skirts.  Twins, Seri realized,
seeing their identical faces as they stood up.

   "Is there anyone else?" Seri asked.  The olive-eyed girl shook her head,
lips tightly shut.  She looked Seri up and down, taking in her nakedness,
but didn't comment.

   "Ok." Seri sized up all 4 girls and took a deep breath.  "Listen.  You
know we lost and the town is burned.  All the mages and everyone left here
is gone.  the Monstrum took them." She left unsaid just what was happening
to them now.  "We don't want to be captured the same way.  We have to leave
right away, before any bugs return for stragglers.  Understand?  We can cut
through the forest and reach the King's Highway in a couple of days."

   The girls nodded dully, still stiff with fear despite Seri's calming
magic.  The poor things.  All she could do was get them away from here.

   "Once we get back to the garrison, we should be able to get
reinforcements." Seri also omitted how tenuous of a prospect this was - no
need to worry the girls further.

   "Then they...uh, they can come back and rescue everyone." Just like her
own company had been sent to rescue the villagers.  Some hero she was. 
Seri swallowed the fresh pang of guilt that clutched at her throat and
squeezed her eyes shut against the tears.  After a few deep breaths, she
opened them again, and saw four pairs of eyes staring back at her full of
fear.

   She straightened.  She held her staff upright.  She had to be an
example. She was the one in charge, the one with the magic.  If she showed
fear, they would feel the same thing.  These girls deserved better than to
be turned into fucktoys for bugs, but she would only be able to save them
from that fate if she was strong.

   Strong.  Like Marcus.  Seri caught the hitch in her chest before it
could turn into a sob.  She would have given anything at that moment to
feel his strong arms around her, to hear him whisper to his little sister
that everything would be all right.

   She took another deep breath, trying to steady herself, then led the
girls to the ladder.  She took the lead, climbing up into the sunlight
again.  She would be strong.  She wouldn't lose this time.  As weak as it
was, she still had her magic, and nothing was going to stand in her way. 
She was going to lead these girls back to civilization, to safety, and then
she was going to leave it all and go home.  They'd come looking for her
eventually, of course.  Deserters were punished harshly.  But she'd be long
gone by then, her and Marcus, and gods help anyone that stood in their way



   ~*~

   Chapter 2



   ~*~

   "Seri!"

   She stopped crying when she heard the echoing voice.  It came from the
narrow gap far above, where the lone shaft of sunlight slanted down feebly.

   "'Marcus!" She cried out.  Seri's tears turned to joy.  She thought she
had been going to die down here.  But Marcus was here.  Marcus would save
her.  Her arm still hurt - everything hurt - but now he was here.  He would
make everything right.

   "Hold on Seri!  I just have to...to get the rope tied --" Marcus' voice
was distant, but reassuring.  "Are you hurt?"

   "Yeah --" Seri sniffed.  She could feel the warm blood on her scalp. 
Everything had happened so fast.  First the rumbling under her feet, then
the ground itself moving, falling, pitching her head over heels down the
hillside to plunge screaming into the ravine.  The memory was foggy.  She
had woken some time later to darkness and pain and the taste of blood in
her mouth.

   "Gods...gods curse it all.  Ok, there." Marcus shouted from far above as
he secured the rope, letting his voice comfort her.  "Just hang tight Seri.
Don't move.  You fell a long way but I'm going to get you out.  Ok,
ladybug?"

   Seri cracked an involuntary smile despite her sniffling.  He changed his
pet names for her practically every month, but ladybug seemed to have stuck
for a while.  She could hear him shuffling far overhead, and a knotted rope
began to feed down through the crack into the narrow chasm she was stuck
in. It dangled and steadied, then began to quiver as Marcus descended from
above.

   "Hold on...just hold on --" Seri wasn't used to hearing this kind of
fear in his voice.  Not fear of the mountain, or the height, she knew.  No.
The icy dread was fear for her.  She didn't know how long she had been
stuck here.  Hours maybe.  How long had they been looking?  The light stung
her eyes and her vision began to swim dizzily as she tilted her head to
look up, seeing his growing form eclipsing the wan sunlight from above.

   "Seri!" He finally reached the end of the rope and dropped the last few
feet.  "Oh gods, Seri!" She could feel his hands on her face, touching her,
his voice quivering.  Why were his fingers so sticky?  No, it was her.  Her
blood.  She blinked but couldn't focus.  He was crouching over her,
indistinct.

   "Ok, there's a bit of blood, ladybug, but nothing you can't handle I
know." The confidence had returned to his voice.  He wasn't going to let
his little sister see how scared he was.

   "Tell me where it hurts Seri," he said.

   Seri coughed, her throat stinging.  "My...my arm," she said weakly.

   She could feel him moving.  Spikes of pain still lanced in her right
arm. She couldn't move it at all.

   "Ok...fuck." Marcus was grunting, pushing at something.  Seri heard the
sound of rock grinding against rock.  "I'm going to have to..to --"

   His face appeared in her vision again, hovering directly over hers.

   "Seri there's a boulder on your arm.  I'm going to have to move it. 
It's going to hurt.  Try to keep your arm still, ok?"

   She nodded.  The world was getting dimmer, like a fog was creeping in.
That was odd.  There shouldn't be fog in here.

   "Stay with me Seri." His fingers touched her cheek.  "Don't go to sleep.
Just a little hurt and then you're going to be fine.  Ladybugs don't feel
pain.  Remember that rhyme I taught you?"

   She remembered.  He had made it up on the spot one day when they were
alone in the fields.  She started to mumble it then began coughing.  Her
chest hurt bad, and her lips were dry and cracked.  She tasted blood on her
tongue.

   "Oh pretty ladybug, wings spread aloft," he prompted.  "Come on Seri,
say it for me."

   "No pain comes now, nor touch so soft." The words felt funny in her
mouth.  The world was getting blurrier.

   "With jeweled wings on fingers alight --" he said, taking off his shirt.
The muscles of his chest and arms bulged tightly.  He began to wedge his
body between the big rock and the wall of the crevasse.

   "A ray of hope from stars so bright."

   "A true kiss of love --" His muscles flexed as he tested the rock,
steadying himself.

   "Sent from gods above," she whispered weakly.

   "And a child conceived in the night," he finished.

   She felt herself smile.  That last part always warmed her heart.  Her
eyelids felt so heavy that she felt like she could drift off, happy just
that he was with her.

   "Here we go Seri."

   Seri heard the sound of grating rock as Marcus heaved.  Her eyes flew
open and she shrieked.  A pain lanced up her arm like a spike shoved into
the bone.  Marcus was straining, muscled corded and flushed red with blood.
It was all over in a moment.  Seri felt a massive weight shift and heard
the crash of the rock hitting the ground behind her.  The pain died to an
angry throb that pulsed all throughout her arm and shoulder.

   "M-Marcus --" she cried.  Tears were running down her cheeks again.  It
had hurt so bad.

   "Shh, it's ok.  I'm here."

   She felt his strong arms dig under her and pull her up out of the crack
she had fallen into.  He lifted her like a doll then lay her on the smooth
stone to the side.

   "Thank the gods you're ok, Seri," Marcus said.  His voice carried a
slight tremble, a brief crack in his facade as he bent down to look at her.
"We were looking for you for hours.  You're 8 years old now and you still
get into so much trouble.  You know you shouldn't walk on the hillsides
when it's raining like this.  There are mudslides."

   "It had stopped raining," she sniffed.

   "It's still dangerous." She could feel his hands on her, feeling her,
looking for more broken bones.  She winced when he touched her arm, so he
stayed away from that, squeezing her shoulders, running them down her flat
breasts and tummy.

   "Does it hurt when I do this?" he asked, pressing tenderly at her belly.
Seri shook her head.

   He finished examining her legs.  "Well, you might get out of this with
just a broken arm, Seri.  I don't like the look of that cut on your head
though.  It's a lot of blood."

   He bent close to inspect it, putting his face directly next to hers. 
She could feel his hot breath, the sweaty strength of his muscles.  He
sensed her staring and looked down to meet her gaze.  A silence stretched
between them.  He really was so handsome, with his curly blonde hair.

   She pushed her lips against his with gentle pressure, and felt him push
back.  A warm thrill spread through her as her older brother kissed her
passionately.  She wiggled and moaned involuntarily, her pain all but
forgotten, but he broke the kiss and bent to whisper in her ear.

   "I thought I lost you, Seri." The pained quiver in his voice was
unmistakable..  "Don't do that to me."

   She nodded, ashamed, as he pulled back and looked down at her again.

   "I'm going to make a harness for you," he said, pulling a second loop of
rope from his belt.  He ran it around her thighs and under her crotch,
helping her roll slightly to loop it up and over her arms too.  She winced
when he touched her right arm and he loosened the rope and tied it closer
to her shoulder.

   "Ok.  Grab on as tight as you can little sis." His arms went around her
again and he somehow got her to sit up.  The woozy feeling intensified. 
The light above her was swirling like it was circling a drain, but she felt
the rope in her hand and his back against her chest, and she held on.  The
ground dropped away beneath her as he lifted her on his back.  She always
liked it when he did that, taking her off the ground like she weighed
nothing.  He reached back and helped her wrap her legs tightly around his
waist, then pulled the rope tight and knotted it to secure her to his back.

   "Almost there.  Sorry if it hurts little ladybug, but it's just a short
climb" She felt him grab the rope and tug on it.  Her chest still hurt but
it was dwarfed by the agonizing throb in her arm.

   "You ready?"

   She nodded, her chin against his shoulder.  The ground seemed to fall
away.  Marcus' hands went up and up, climbing each notch of the knotted
rope, lifting them both up towards the light.



   ~*~



   Seri awoke with a start.  She sat up, hearing the sounds of the night
forest all around her.

   "Marcus?" He had just been here.  Right here.  She could still feel the
solid presence of his back, hear his heavy breathing.  She put a hand to
her head.  No.  Just a dream.  She had been dreaming so much lately, almost
every night.  She didn't know why.

   "Seri?" A girl's voice.  Selise, the curly-haired girl her own age.  She
was sitting up on the opposite side of the patch of smoldering embers that
had been their campfire.

   "S-sorry," Seri said.  Instinctively she felt for her wards.  They were
intact.  She had included Ursa this time, obviously.  They had travelled
most of the day before collapsing in this little lee by the ridgeline. 
Seri had started a fire and shared a few emergency rations from her pack,
then watched as the girls drifted off, sleeping next to each other on the
ground and exhausted by their ordeal.  She had intended to stay up and keep
watch but she must have fallen asleep too.

   "Who's Marcus?" Selise asked.

   "Er...nobody," Seri lied.  Selise just looked at her, those uncanny
olive eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

   "Not nobody," Seri sighed.  "He was...uh, is...my brother."

   "Oh." Selise said.  "You were calling out for him.  Something about his
arms."

   "Well, uh, nevermind that," Seri said, her cheeks burning with
embarrassment.  She was grateful for the darkness to hide that, at least.

   "You were awake?" she asked.  "Did you see anything?  Hear anything
weird?"

   Selise shook her head.  "Just owls.  Are there...monsters out here too?"

   Seri nodded.  No point in lying.  Selise seemed like the kind of person
who could tell anyway.

   "Oh...but your magic protects us, right?"

   Seri sighed.  "Against some things, yes.  But I can't detect every kind
of monster at once.  There are so many, and new ones being discovered all
the time.  Something could still sneak up on us."

   Selise remained silent, her eyes wide as she scanned the darkness around
them, searching for hidden menace.

   "Hey, don't worry," Seri said.  If anything does show itself I'll melt
it with a fireball, or blast it away with air, or just disintegrate it. 
Piece of cake." She hoped her smile was comforting.  Selise seemed to relax
slightly.

   "You can do...all those things?  With the magic?" Selise asked

   "Sure." Seri shrugged.  "You can do practically anything with magic, if
you know how."

   "I've only ever seen mages once before.  They came to Alara for the
testing they do every few years."

   "To see if you have the gift.  The spark," Seri said.  "Did they test
you?"

   "Yeah.  They said I only had a tiny bit.  Not even worth training.  I
guess if I had had more they would have bundled me off to the mage school."
Selise shuddered.

   "It's not so bad," Seri said.  "You get to study magic and use it every
day.  We might even have been classmates."

   "Don't they make you study books about how the monsters will rape you?"

   "Well --yes," Seri admitted.  "But there's a lot more to it than that.
Battle techniques and anatomy lessons and all kinds of things.

   Selise shook her head firmly and pulled up her legs to hug her knees. 
"Uh uh.  I don't want to know anything about monsters.  Nothing."

   Seri wasn't sure what to say to that, so she changed the subject.  "So
uh, how did you end up hidden down in that cellar anyway?"

   "Alyssia's mom," Selise said.  "She grabbed all four of us and led us
down there as soon as the bugs appeared.  Said we had to be totally quiet
or we'd be caught."

   "Hmm," Seri murmured.  "You didn't hide with your own families?"

   Selise shook her head.  "Don't got any.  Me and Nelle and Nola...we're
all orphans."

   "Oh --" Seri said.  "Sorry."

   "We knew Alyssia though.  We just happened to be there when her mom sent
us all down.  I think she had planned the space for just Alyssia."

   "It looked pretty tight in there," Seri agreed.  "So, what about them?"
She gestured to where the two twins were sleeping together, arms hugging
each other tightly.

   "Oh...Nelle and Nola.  They lost Nina a while back.  She was a couple
years older."

   "Sickness?" Seri asked.

   "No --a Centaurum raid." Selise shook her head.  "I don't know the
details."

   The conversation lapsed into silence.  Seri checked the sky.  Moonlight
flooded the valley floor.  It would be a while until sunrise.

   "You should get some more sleep," Seri said.  "We'll have to start
marching again at dawn."

   "Don't you need to sleep too?" Selise asked.

   Seri shrugged.  "I can keep going for a while.  I know some spells that
will help.  They won't last forever though and I can't use them on all of
us."

   Selise nodded, then laid back down on the grass.  Seri watched the rise
and fall of her chest for a time as the girl's breathing slowed.  She
shivered, and drew a trickle of magic around herself to ward off the cold.
Being naked was embarrassing, the way the girls had kept looking at her,
but she was used to all kinds of stares.

   Selise was asleep now.  Trying not to make noise, Seri pulled the tiny
pouch off her belt, and fed it magic.  It enlarged itself in her hands,
growing back to a full-sized bag.  She reached inside and felt for the
stolen tome, then pulled it out.  It was heavy in her lap, radiating with
uncanny menace.  Seri thought she heard a brief flurry of whispers, far
off, somewhere she couldn't place, and she couldn't shake the feeling that
if the book had a face, it would be smiling at her with cruel promise.

   She shook her head to dispel the feeling.  Just the magic.  Wards,
crafted to keep out the foolish and the unwary.  It was a good warning for
her to remember how dangerous the book was.  Tinkering with magic whose
function you didn't know was rarely advisable, but Seri was determined to
unravel every secret this ancient tome held.

   Carefully, she brushed the pages at the back of the book with her magic,
testing the seal.  Her spell broke, the weave snapped as if cut by shears.
The book still didn't want her skipping to the end.  She'd have to resume
where she left off.  More importantly, the feeling of her spell coming
apart confirmed it to her: her spell had failed the same way during the
battle.  Had the book done that?  It seemed impossible; it had been sealed
safely inside the extradimensional space inside her bag.  Dangerous.  If
the thing weren't so important, Seri would have thrown it away, but she
knew it held the answers she needed: where the monsters came from, why they
hunted and raped human girls.  Seri looked at the 4 sleeping girls sharing
the clearing with her.  What would become of them if she couldn't figure
this out?  Her mind conjured an image of each of them, naked little
fucktoys bouncing and squealing on an endless horde of monster cocks as
their pregnant bellies bounced back and forth.

   Not if she had anything to say about it.  She dug her finger in to the
middle of the book and it opened right where she had left off.  She began
to read.

   The ancient civilization the pages depicted must be Aen Sielle: she had
been growing more and more sure of it.  They had been at the height of
their power and produced magical wonders the like of which the world had
never seen: floating cities, magical machines that controlled the weather,
giant portals that could span different worlds.  But something had
happened: they ended up in a great war, a war against what they now called
the Abyss.  The text described endless hordes of monsters and demons from
the lower planes appearing in the world.  Their ferocity and numbers had
taken the kingdoms of the world by surprise: although they commanded great
power, the art of direct warfare had been obsolete for centuries.

   Much of the account was impossible for Seri to translate.  She made out
a few bits here and there, enough to determine that the mages of Aen Sielle
knew they were losing, and they had come up with the grand ritual to shift
the balance.  She turned the page, and came upon a detailed account of what
the book had hinted at earlier: a massive gathering of mages standing on a
temple mount with a vast series of arcane diagrams etched in the ground. 
The text here had a lot more words that Seri recognized, and after
carefully consulting her notes she was able to piece together the ritual's
purpose: to eradicate the monstrum races attacking the world by a subtle
alteration to their fertility, so that they could only bear male young and
never female.

   At first it seemed like it had succeeded astonishingly well.  The
Monstrum momentum gradually halted, and the mages fought them to a
standstill as the invaders' numbers began to wane over the decades.  The
attrition was working.  It wasn't until later that the taint of the spell
became known: one of the most powerful mages - a woman that the book
depicted wearing robes as white as snow - had altered the flows in a way
the other mages couldn't detect, giving the spell a side effect.  It had
reached out to affect the fertility of all the Monstrum races on all the
planes, as designed, but it went farther than it should have.  Fertility
was stolen from the females of the Monstrum races, but instead of
destroying it, the spell had shifted it to the females of all other races.
It was still twisted by the spell's initial effect though: only males could
be borne, ensuring the cycle couldn't be broken.

   There was more: the technical descriptions of the spell's inner workings
were far beyond Seri, but she gathered that the taint had additional
aspects to it that took a while to discover.  Monstrum ejaculate was imbued
with effects that greatly enhanced the pleasure of intercourse and also
granted some measure of magical adaptability to the female's body to make
her a more suitable mate.  The Conversion effect.  Over time it came to
evoke intense and persistent sexual cravings, with the details varying from
species to species.

   Seri looked up when a thrush called overhead.  It was dawn already.  She
shut the book with a sigh and slipped it back into her pack, then got up.
She roused the other girls, who each sat up rubbing their eyes sleepily.

   "Is there anything to eat?" Selise asked, yawning into her hand.

   "Sorry," Seri said.  "We used up the rations But I can help a bit with
the hunger."

   She swung her staff, conjuring a light evocation that affected them all.
Now their hunger pangs wouldn't bite quite as hard.

   "There," she said.  "It will have to do.  We need to get moving though.
We have to reach the highway as soon as possible.  It's not safe to stay
out here."

   "I want to go home!" One of the twins cried out.  She began sobbing,
drawing her legs up and burying her face in them.  Her sister wrapped her
in a hug, whispering in her ear.

   "There's nothing there, little one." Seri kneeled down next to the
crying girl and patted her shoulder.  "You can't look back now.  You have
to look forward.  You have to be strong." She tried her best confident
smile.  Funny, she remembered Marcus saying the same things to her whenever
she had been afraid.  Now it was her turn.

   "Here, look." Seri raised her staff, the A'sham hovering in the air, and
poured magic into a complex whirlpool.  Light flickered to life in front of
the girl's face: a pleasing amber glow, pulsing in a shifting matrix of
sparkling streaks that glittered and darted about like comets.  The girl
looked up, and stopped crying.  She stared at the light show in awe, tears
on her face.  Seri made sure to look away, lest she be mesmerized by her
own magic.  She wasn't great at this spell, but it worked.  The little girl
calmed down.  Her chest stopped hitching.  She wiped the tears off her
cheeks with dirty hands.

   "It'll be ok Nelle," Nola said, brushing her twin's arm.  Nelle sniffled
a final time and then nodded as Seri let the spell fade away.  The girls
would have to learn to be brave to survive this nightmare, but Seri could
at least take away a little of their fear for now.

   With nothing to pack, they were able to set out at once.  The forest
trails were tight and confusing but Seri knew how to navigate the
wilderness.  She used her magic to clear rocks and fallen logs that barred
their way, and they made steady progress up out of the valley.  At the top
of a slope, Seri paused and looked back.  The morning sun shined down
cheerfully on the burnt town, as if nothing had happened.  Alyssia stopped
next to her to gaze at the smoking ruin.

   "What...what's happening to my mom right now?" she asked.

   Seri swallowed uncomfortably.  Maybe she should make up a lie, but she
felt sure Alyssia would know.  The little girl stood staring at her with
her piercing blue eyes.

   "The Chrysilae, they...uh...they breed with the girls they take." Seri
motioned and they started walking again.

   "So they're raping her?  Like the Org did to Alannia?" Alyssia asked. 
Seri swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.

   "Someone told me that Alannia's probably pregnant by now.  That she'll
be having an Org baby.  She's only 6 but they said it didn't matter with
Org-reh.  Is that true?"

   "Well...how long ago did they take her?" Seri asked.

   "4 months," Alyssia said.

   The breeze whispered through the forest as they entered an area of
scattered pines.  Dry leaves began to crunch under the girl's feet as they
walked.  Seri kept scanning the area for hostiles but she did some quick
math in her head: 3 weeks for full gestational compatibility with a girl so
young.  Conception within a week after that.  4 months from conception to
birth.  Yes, the girl was probably quite far along by now.

   Alyssia took Seri's nod stoically.  "And my mom?" she asked.  "How long
until the bugs put little bug babies inside of her?"

   "Well...certain ovarian changes need to happen first --" Seri said,
trying to deflect.

   "How long?" The determined clench of Alyssia's jaw looked odd on the
9-year-old.

   "Since she's a fertile woman already of child-bearing age I'd
say...um...2 weeks."

   Alyssia nodded resolutely.  "Then we have to get out and back with more
soldiers in 2 weeks.  Then we can go get my mom.  I don't want one of those
bugs for a brother."

   Seri pretended to agree.  She wasn't going to add that, with Alyssia's
mother being pounded by bug prick around the clock and exposed to the rapid
Conversion effect of the bug resin, she would soon be enjoying herself
immensely.  There would be no rescue.

   The girls walked for a time in silence, the only sounds the whispering
of the breeze through the trees and the rustling of the branches overhead.
They crossed a tiny stream, wading barefoot, and continued.  As they
climbed further up the slope, they came to the edge of a ravine and turned
to follow it.

   Seri tried not to dwell on her defeat.  She would be disgraced if they
ever got back, but she didn't care.  At least she would be alive.  And
right now she had something more important than herself to worry about:
these 4 girls.  They trusted her.  Alyssia still looked at her with awe,
like she was larger than life - a mage out of a fairy tale, wielding
incomprehensible powers to drive off the kingdom's enemies and set things
right.  They would have been better off with any other mage, but Seri was
all they had, and she was determined to live up to their trust.  She knew
if Marcus was here it would be what he expected of her.

   The ravine widened.  Seri peered over the edge.  A rushing stream cut
through the mountain over a dozen feet below them.  It looked deep.  The
strip of land they were on narrowed as they climbed.  They were nearing the
tops of the hills, and on the other side it would be an easier trek down
into more level land with actual roads.

   "It's a bit narrow --" Nelle said, stopping ahead of them.

   Seri looked.  The path dwindled to a small strip next to the cliff face,
with moss and the occasional root sticking out to bar the way.

   "We can make it.  Just put your back against the rock," Seri said.  She
wished she were strong enough to conjure a bridge of air, but they'd have
to make do with their hands and feet.

   "If we get past this, we can cross, up there." Seri pointed, and they
all looked at the natural bridge that swept across the divide up ahead. 
"Here, follow me."

   She slung her staff carefully and pressed up against the wall.  The
ground projected out only about a foot, and it was lumpy and uncertain
footing.  She began to shimmy to the side, using roots for handholds.

   "See?  Piece of cake." She smiled confidently at the other girls, and
they followed her lead.  One by one, the girls moved onto the narrow ledge,
holding on to roots and rocks with their backs to the ravine.

   "Don't look down," Seri murmured.  "First rule of climbing."

   "Oops.  I already did." Selise was right behind her, her eyes wide with
trepidation.  Seri kept moving.  Pebbles and patches of dirt crumbled under
their feet, rolling down to bounce into the crevasse.  Seri was the biggest
so she figured if she could make it, the others could too.  Her left foot
slipped once, failing to find purchase on some loose dirt, but she grabbed
hold of a root in time and kept moving.

   "Just a little bit farther now." Seri could see the path widen up ahead
where it began to climb up some narrow rock shelves.  "Once we reach there
we're home free."

   Her blood froze and her heart stopped when she heard the shriek: it came
from above, diving swiftly towards them.  She heard the other girls scream
just as a heavy impact dashed them against the cliff.

   "Seri clutched desperately for her staff.  A Vile Buzzard!  The
disgusting feathered creatures were more common in high, inaccessible
areas, but there must be a nest nearby.  An impact slammed her again and
she was buffeted by a wing.  Reeking feathers blocked her vision.  She felt
the cool ash of her staff in her grip and gritted her teeth together as she
struck out.

   A pained squall rattled her eardrums as Seri virtually ripped her magic
out of the air and hurled it unformed at the man-sized bird.  Wings flapped
desperately, and she could see the creature hovering tenuously as it
clutched a taloned foot around the waist of each of the twins.  The girls
were screaming, grasping desperately at roots as the bird plucked them from
the cliffside.  Seri struck again, panicking.  She couldn't let the bird
have them.  She wouldn't!  Her magic rang out with a thump and the bird
screeched again, dripping blood from fresh wounds.  The ground began to
crumble under their feet, and Seri managed to grab on to a protruding rock.

   With horror, she watched as one of the twins dropped from the giant
bird's talon.  The girl plummeted into the dark ravine below them with an
echoing scream.

   "NOOO!" Seri lashed out furiously, her vision filling with a red rage.
Impact after impact shook the air.  She could hear Alyssia and Selise next
to her, screaming, barely holding on.  Seri gathered all her strength into
a giant ball of rage and unleashed the most powerful jolt that she could.
The bang slammed into the giant buzzard, cracking in the air like a
concussion, leaving Seri with the breath knocked out of her and ears
ringing.  Dizzy, she felt the rush of air around her, heard girls
screaming, fading.  Water splashed coldly around her, then rose up to
envelop her with a clammy embrace.



   ~*~

   Seri's arms and legs jerked as she vomited.  Water rushed out of her
throat and she inhaled air into her tortured windpipe.  Sharp gravel
crunched against her arms.  She pulled herself up and looked around in a
panic.  There!  Her staff floated in the water just nearby.  She grabbed
it, mastering her fear as she felt the smooth wooden shaft against her
palm.

   She had washed up on a rocky shore in a slow-moving section of the
stream.  The cliffs stretched impossibly high overhead, blotting out the
sun.  Only a small amount of light filtered down through cracks in the
rocks.  Selise was next to her, choking up water.  Alyssia was helping her
cough it up by pounding on her back.  Seri's eyes darted.  She saw two
ragged bundles of cloth in the slow-moving water and waded in to grab them.
Just rags.  Where were the twins?  There - thrashing in the water just on
the edge of the pool.  Seri splashed fiercely through the chest-level water
and hauled them both up by their arms.  Their heads broke the surface,
coughing.  She pulled them over to the shore, and they all collapsed
together on the rock.

   The twins were naked, she realized.  Their trim little 8-year-old bodies
were shivering and wet with droplets everywhere.  The Vile Buzzard had
shredded their meager clothing with its talons as it grabbed them.  The
sopping rags Seri had pulled up probably wouldn't be good for anything.

   She swung her staff and light blossomed around them, illuminating the
cave.  Then she collapsed to her knees again next to the other girls, all 4
of them coughing and gasping for air.

   "Ugh --" Selise was holding her head, panting.  "That hurt.  What...what
was that thing?"

   "Vile Buzzard," Seri coughed.  The rocks felt sharp on her hands and
knees.  "Not common out here." She looked over at the twins.

   "Are you two alright?  Did it hurt you when it grabbed you?"

   Nelle shook her head, but Nola was sniffling and cradling her arm.  Seri
scooted over to take a look at it.

   "Can you move it?  Like this?" Seri touched the little girl's arm but
she winced and whimpered and shrugged away.  Broken, probably.  Seri lifted
her staff and condensed her magic into a complex pattern.  This weave was
always too much for her, but she did her best, knowing it would be better
than nothing.  She probed with her power, then sent it into Nola's arm,
feeling the bone begin to mend itself, the wounds on the skin begin to knit
together and close.  The arm shimmered with a dull green light for a
moment, then faded away.

   "Better?" Seri asked.  Nola moved her arm experimentally, wincing only
slightly.

   "Wow.  It doesn't hurt as much now," she said.

   "I can't heal it all the way," Seri confessed.  The scrapes and cuts
looked like they had been healing for a couple days now, but it was the
bone that she had focused on.

   "You'll need to go easy on it for a bit," Seri said.  Nola nodded and
managed a smile.  Alyssia was looking at her with her jaw hanging open,
like she had witnessed a miracle.

   "Hmmm, let's try this." Seri dug at the pile of shredded scraps that had
been the twin's clothes and ripped off some strips of cloth.  She wrapped
them around Nola's arm and then tied the ends around her neck to fashion a
crude sling.

   "There, that should help." Seri gave the naked girl a comforting smile.
"You know, I broke my arm once when I was your age.  I had to have it in a
sling like that for 6 months.  We didn't have any mages around though. 
With the magic, your arm should be feeling better in a couple days."

   "Thanks Seri." Nola hiccuped, still shivering from the cold.  Her tiny
nipples were standing out, erect.

   "How far did the water carry us?" asked Selise.  "It felt like a long
way."

   Seri nodded, peering upwards.  The rocky ceiling was high above them,
pocked with stalactites with only a few slanting cracks between them to let
the sunlight bleed through.  Marcus wouldn't be able to get her out of this
one, but at least the Vile Buzzards wouldn't be able to find them here. 
The last thing she wanted was to be raped in a giant bird nest.

   "I think it goes underground here.  Look." Seri pointed with her staff
to where the rock met the water.  Foamy bubbles rippled just under the
surface.

   "How are we going to get out?" Alyssia had closed her mouth long enough
to look upwards with the rest of them.  "There's no way we can climb all
the way up there.  Can you make us fly Seri?"

   "Er, no.  I can't." Seri felt herself blush, a prickling heat that
fought with the lingering chill of the weater.  "Only a few mages are
strong enough to fly.  It's pretty hard."

   "Oh." The disappointment in Alyssia's voice was palpable.  She had
clearly thought Seri was capable of anything.

   Seri looked around, taking stock of their feeble party: Nelle and Nola,
naked, the latter with her arm bound by strips of dripping cloth.  Selise
peering upwards at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking, and Alyssia
shivering as her soggy blue dress clung to her body.  They looked like a
party of drowned rats.  Seri's own hair was plastered wetly to her face and
neck.  Well, even if she couldn't make them fly, she could still help.

   With a slow swing of her staff, she mustered her power and pulled it
into a weave that she diffused into the air all around them.  Warmth
blossomed in the cave like a balm.  In moments, Alyssia had stopped
shivering, and they all began to dry rapidly.  The twins stopped hugging
each other for warmth, the slick droplets of their naked bodies evaporating
before their eyes.

   "Ooooooh, that feels good." Alyssia rubbed her arms to chase away her
last shivers, and then looked at her dress in amazement.  It was dry
already.  "That's so amazing."

   "It'll be amazing if I can get us out of here," Seri murmured.  There
really didn't seem to be any way out.  A better mage probably would have
had a dozen ways, but Seri was well accustomed to her own limitations.

   "If you can't make us fly, can you cut a tunnel in the rock?" Alyssia
asked her.

   "No...sorry," Seri said sheepishly.  "That takes a lot of power."

   "Can you freeze the water so we can walk on it?"

   "Erm...no." Seri felt her blush return.

   "Can you give us sticky hands like a lizard so we can climb out?"

   Seri thought for a moment.  "Good idea, but...no.  Sorry."

   "Well other than drying us out, what CAN you do?" asked Selise.

   "Look, I'm just...I'm not very strong with magic, ok?  I was the weakest
one in the company.  The other mages are all better than me." Seri
struggled to meet the gazes of the four pairs of eyes looking at her.  "But
right now, they're all getting raped by bugs in that hive in the mountains.
I'm the one that got out, and right now, I'm all we've got."

   Selise looked at her for a moment, and then nodded, looking
disappointed. Seri had told her how magic could do almost anything, but now
she understood that that was magic wielded by other mages, more competent
mages.  Alyssia was frowning unhappily.  Her hero worship of mages was
evaporating as fast as the water that had covered them apparently.  The
twins looked on, saying nothing.

   The silence stretched on until Seri pointed her staff and conjured a
flame from a small pit in the rock.  It crackled merrily like a campfire,
filling the space with a sweet smell.

   "Let's just rest a while, ok?  I can make the rocks feel soft." Seri
tried to give them a confident smile.  It felt strange.  She had always
been the one that needed help, that needed to rely on her big brother.  He
had always been there for her, but now she needed to be the one that these
girls could trust.  She didn't like the feeling.

   They said little as they stretched out on the rocky ground by the fire.
The light was already fading from overhead and plunging them into darkness,
though Seri wasn't sure if that was because the sun was setting or if it
was just at the wrong angle to shine all the way down to them.  Eventually,
their breathing slowed as they dropped off to sleep one by one.  Seri had
cast the meager wards that she could, but she couldn't stay up for watch.
She had reached the limits of her magic's ability to keep her going without
sleep.

   The fire popped.  It was a good imitation of a real campfire.  The twins
both had their eyes closed, asleep in each other's arms.  Selise looked
almost peaceful with her head resting on a rock like a pillow.

   "Seri?"

   She turned to see Alyssia staring at her, her eyes shining from the
firelight.

   "We're not getting my mom back, are we?" she asked.

   Seri swallowed the painful lump in her throat as she stared into the
flames.

   "No," she whispered

   Alyssia stared into the fire with her for a minute longer, then turned
over to face away without saying anything.  Seri felt tears well up in the
corners of her eyes, but she wiped them away.  All she wanted was to feel
her brother's strong arms around her, to hear him whisper in her ear that
it would all be ok.  She had never been the strong one.  Nobody should look
to her to be in charge.  But Seri knew that if he were here, he would want
her to stand up and fight to her last breath no matter how hard it was.  He
would expect it.  He had always believed in her.

   Seri wiped away the tears before they could form and took a deep breath.
She would do it.  She would make him proud, even if he wasn't here.  It was
all she had left.  Resolve began to fill her even as she began to drift
off. She would get them out of this.  She'd find a way.  Even if she
couldn't be the hero Val was always bragging about, she could at least get
these girls to where they would be safe.  There was nobody else.

   It would have to be enough.



   ~*~

   Darkness and flames surrounded her.  The night breeze carried streams of
burning embers and the sounds of harrowing screams to her ears.  Girl's
screams.  Hulking, four-legged silhouettes galloped to and fro across the
backdrop of the burning village.

   Another raid.  The endless raids.  Fear pounded a heavy drumbeat in
Seri's head as doom played out before her eyes.  A pair of girls ran into
the cobbled street, shrieking in terror.  They barely got a dozen feet
before a vast shadow reared up in front of them, hooves flashing.  A net
dropped over them both and cinched tight in an instant.  The girls were
lifted off the ground, shrieking, as a beast with the conjoined bodies of a
horse and a man peered at them fiendishly.  Centaurum.

   The creatures were everywhere, chasing the villagers from their homes.
One beast ran in close pursuit of a sprinting girl carrying a baby,
galloping just behind to force her this way and that, making sport of her.
Eventually it cornered her by a wagon, smiling down at them both
malevolently.  The girl's screams joined the background chorus, and her
wailing intensified when she saw what the creature had dangling from its
nethers.  Another Centaurum trotted up the road, a wiggling girl under each
arm.  They couldn't have been more than 8, far too small to fight back.

   Seri turned this way and that, dizzied by the chaos.  She couldn't
remember anything.  The pulsing, blinding fear had risen up to drive all
other thoughts out of her head.  Focus.  Breathe.  She inhaled and coughed
on the smoke.

   Suddenly one of the beasts was in front of her, rearing up on its hind
legs like a horse.  Seri felt her mouth open but nothing came out.  The
upper body of a man flashed in front of her eyes, powerfully muscled,
naked, with a handsome face that wore a twisted, cruel leer.  He stared
down at her, licking his lips.  Seri felt her legs quake with fear and she
looked down: she was naked.  How?  She felt the monster's eyeballs crawl
all over her 12-year-old body, savoring it like a sweet taste before the
main course.

   Fight.  The word cut through the madness in her head.  She gripped her
staff in her hand, feeling the comfort of the smooth ash.  She swung,
loosing power with a word from her lips, but nothing happened.  The
Centaurum grabbed the head of her staff in mid-swing and wrenched it from
her grasp, then snapped it in two with a powerful flex of its biceps.  Seri
fell backwards onto her butt as the horse-man advanced on her, steeping
forward until he was almost straddling her cowering form.  Her eyes
couldn't help but drop, coming to rest on the massive horse cock jutting
from the creature's groin, pointing straight at her.

   A scream carried on the wind.  Flames flashed in her eyes.  Seri was
standing in the village square.  All around her the monsters bustled,
lining up their captured, weeping prisoners and lashing them in bent-over
positions to crude hitching posts.  A bounty of girls, all near her own
age. Knives flashed, cutting away their clothing, hands dipping to squeeze
the flesh underneath.  The beasts were eager.  They began to line up, each
one taking positions behind a crying girl who squirmed against the leather
straps that bound her wrists and ankles to the posts.  A neat line of
little girl pussy, fresh, ready to be enjoyed.  One by one, they each moved
to straddle their girl, letting her feel the thick shaft of veiny horsecock
brushing against her buttocks, lubricated by the dripping trail of slimy
horse precum.  They grinned fiendishly, savoring the screams of their
victims, their futile struggles at their first feel of horsecock pushing
against their genitals.  Those bulging phalluses pushed against the tiny,
hairless slits almost comically, an impossible fit, but as Seri watched,
each one managed to line up with its enormous glans spreading the tiny
little labias to bursting, and then ram itself inside.  The girls shrieked
one after another, echoing cries as they were penetrated.  Their first
rape. Their first feel of thick horse prick slamming home inside them. 
Seri's fear gave way before a strange arousal, a burning heat that
blossomed in her nethers unbidden.

   The posts bucked back and forth as the horse-men rammed their cocks into
the tiny struggling girls.  It was chaos.  It was music.  Thrusting horse
pricks flushed thicker with excitement, the Centaurum grunting with delight
as they enjoyed the tight insides of their victims.  Sweat dripped from
their heaving horse flanks down onto the backsides of the bound girls,
glistening in the light of the blazing bonfire of the town.  A frenzied,
pulsing, primal rhythm began to swell, horse cocks pounding into countless
little girl pussies, penetrating deeply, battering wombs and stretching
pussy walls almost to the breaking point.  Girls shrieked, arms and legs
jerking, but unable to struggle with their wrists and ankles tightly bound.
The cries of terror began to transform, turning to howls of delight and
pleasure, the girls revelling in their sexual congress with the beasts of
their nightmares.  Their motions eventually reversed, pushing back
desperately against the fucking rhythm, urging their captors to slam
harder, to drive deeper, to ram every inch of pulsing horsecock as deep
inside as it could go.  Panting gasps turned to roars of pleasure as the
Centaurum began to cum inside their girls, releasing endless floods of
sticky horse cum to flood their pussies and wombs

   It went on for an eternity.  Centaurum pounded away relentlessly,
mounting each girl like a brood mare, slamming eagerly into the straining
depths of her cunt and releasing a tidal wave of vile horse cum.  Each
torrent left a dripping, gooey river of horse sperm oozing out of the
little girl's pussy when the veiny prick finally pulled out.  The Centaurum
began to have even more fun, mounting from the front to ram their stiff
horse cocks down the little girl's throats, cumming in their bellies. 
Every struggling form was plastered in gooey semen, naked pink skin
glistening in the firelight.  They licked, they sucked, they pushed back
against each fresh prick that rammed itself inside, squealing with total
abandon as their horse captors fucked them without end.

   Hair slick with seat.  Saliva dribbling down her chin.  Gooey runners of
bubbling horse semen still on her lips.  Seri looked down at the girl. 
Just one of many, naked and bent over and lashed to the posts like all the
others.  Something odd about her.  Seri bent down, peering close, trying to
see in the flickering firelight.  Blond hair.  Familiar.  The girl looked
up.

   Alyssia.

   Seri fell backwards into an abyss, screaming in surprise.  Smoky fog
covered everything.  Still she fell, air rushing in her ears and drowning
out her own cries, faster and faster, plunging into oblivion --

   Seri rocketed up to a sitting position on the hard rocks, naked chest
heaving, dripping with sweat.  Darkness surrounded her.  The meager amount
of light that had come from the cracks in the ceiling had long fled,
plunging them into darkness in the deep pit of the ravine.  Her magical
fire had died down to almost nothing - just a little dancing flame that
quivered as if afraid of the encroaching shadows all around them.

   She shook her head to try to dispel the nightmare.  It had been so
vivid. She had never been in a Centaurum raid, but the factorum had showed
her what one was like.  It had described in Centaurum battle tactics quite
thoroughly, and devoted just as much space to describing how they raped
their victims in vivid detail.  All of the facts she had studied came again
to her mind, unbidden: genitalia comparable to oversized stallions, up to
50 inches in length and 4 inches in diameter.  Rapid first-tier conversion
effects that caused enlargement of the vaginal interior and throat. 
Ludicrously large ejaculations.  Oh yes, and they *loved* fucking little
girls.  Rapes went on around the clock and impregnation usually occurred
within a week.  Poor Nina.  Seri wondered how Nella and Nola had grieved
for their sister after she was taken, wondered how they would react if Seri
told them that the little girl was probably an eager little horsefucker
now, pregnant and squealing with delight on the pounding ends of turgid
horse cocks several times a day.

   Shivering slightly from her nakedness, Seri sat up.  Her warmth spells
had long since expired and the slow-moving water was stealing what heat the
fire had to offer.  She grunted and planted her staff on the rock to help
herself to her feet, then looked around.  The naked 10-year-old bodies of
Nella and Nola were twined together on the rock, hugging for warmth, their
breathing steady.  Selise was awake already, staring at the dwindling fire.
Alyssia was still asleep facing away from Seri.

   Seri looked up into the darkness, unable to see the ceiling of rock
overhead.  A cold fear was taking root in her heart but she pushed it down.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped over to the stream and bent to splash her
face.  Despite the chill of the air, the cool water felt good.  She dashed
another handful on her forehead, then cupped her hands to drink.

   "Is there anything to eat?  Can you make something?"

   Seri turned to face Selise, the other girl's eyes shining from the
firelight.

   "Not really.  I can conjure a pile of dirt, or rock.  Making something
edible from nothing is actually very hard.  Not many mages can do that."

   "Oh." The word was a dull thud of resigned disappointment, as if Selise
hadn't expected anything else.

   "Once we get out I have spells that could lead us to food.  Roots,
berries, honey - that sort of thing."

   "We have to get out first," Selise said.  The flatness of her voice said
she didn't have much hope of that.

   Seri just nodded.  She looked up again into the darkness and tried to
think.  She wasn't strong enough for most things.  She couldn't fly, or
transmute enough earth to carve their way out, or let them breath
underwater so they could follow the water.  There wasn't really much she
could do at all.  Her instructors at the academy had pulled their hair out
trying to teach her.  The other girls were stirring now.  They'd be looking
to her for answers.  Seri forced herself to concentrate.

   Instead she found her mind drifting.  Back past the academy.  Back to
before she was picked to be a mage.  Why had the recruiters even tested
her? She had barely shown any spark of ability.  But by royal decree no
girl could refuse the tests.  Her life had made so much more sense to her
before that.  Her family.  Her farm.  Her brother.  Her world had been
small, but she had been happy.

   Usually, anyway.  Her mother was stern, and her father was often angry
with her because she wasn't as strong as her brothers.  She remembered a
time during the summer just before she had been drafted, when he had sent
her to chop firewood.  It was an important job: a large store of well-cut
firewood was needed to see the farm through the winter, and the dry season
was the best time to get it.  The axe was almost as big as she was, and she
could barely swing it.  When he saw how little she had produced, her father
had slapped her and sent her to do the job again.

   Marcus found her, of course.  He always did.  He came to her as she was
crying by the stump they used for chopping.

   "It's ok, ladybug," he had said, crouching down and giving her the smile
that always calmed her down.  "Don't cry.  It will be alright."

   "I'm not as strong as you," she sniffled.  "I can't even swing the axe
right.  It's too heavy.  Papa says I'm not done until we have a whole cord
of wood."

   "If that's what he wants, then that's just what you'll give him.  You
can do it." Marcus' smile was unfaltering.  He always had that smile when
he looked at her.  Seri swallowed the lump in her throat and managed a
crooked grin in return.

   "Here, I'll show you." He stood behind her and reached forward, wrapping
her with his arms and placing his hands over her fists where she was
gripping the axe handle.

   "Move your hands a little farther down...there.  You'll get more power
if you hold it at the edge."

   Seri let his hands guide hers as she repositioned.  The axe felt even
heavier this way, but she trusted him to know what to do.  He was taller
than she was and had to crouch slightly behind her.  She liked how tall he
was, how he felt pressed up against her.  She breathed in and smelled horse
sweat.  He must have been working with the mares again today.

   "Just like that...see?" The axehead rose and dipped as he helped her
feel the weight.

   "It's too heavy," she whimpered.

   "That's because you're working against it.  Let the weight be your
friend.  Use it all when you bring the axe down.  It's sharp, so let it do
all the work.  Keep your arms loose, just like that, and bring the axe up
higher.  Now, swing hard.  Swing like you're trying to go all the way
through the wood and split the stump in two."

   "I'll miss." Her voice was quivering.  The axe was held high over her
head, but it was hard to concentrate with her brother pressed up against
her 8-year-old body like that.  She could feel his hardness digging at her
back.  She could barely wait for night to fall and for the rest of the
family to drop off to sleep in their little farmhouse, leaving her alone in
bed with Marcus.

   "You won't miss.  See it happening in your mind, and just let go.  Your
muscles know what to do."

   The hair of his arms was tingling against her smooth skin.  Seri took a
deep breath, and then, letting her arms guide her like he said, brought the
axe down with all her strength on the shaft of wood.  The steel blade bit
clean through and thunked into the stump with a jolt that left her arms
numb.  The pieces of split wood toppled to the grass on both sides.

   "See?" His voice was hot in her ear, his lips tickling her earlobe. 
"Not everything is about muscles, Seri.  It's about technique.  Brains. 
Finesse.  You have a lot more of those things than you give yourself credit
for.  Use them."

   She shivered and dropped the axe.  His hands were slowly gliding up her
bare arms, fingers slipping along her skin.  There was no mistaking the
firm urgency pressing at her behind now.

   "And beauty," he murmured in her ear.  "You have more of that than
anything Seri.  I wonder which of the gods gave me a sister so lovely."

   Seri had moaned and closed her eyes when she felt his kiss against her
neck.  His arms went tight around her and she melted into them.  The bushes
were close by.  The sun hadn't set quite yet.  They had time, if Papa
didn't come looking for her.  He rarely did.

   Her reverie was broken when she heard the girls talking.  Alyssia had
woken, along with Nella and Nola.  They sat in a semicircle around the
dregs of the fire, absorbing the last of its heat.  Despite the chill and
the damp, Seri felt her face burning.  Her Mama had yelled at her for the
grass stains on her dress again when her and Marcus got back, but Seri had
weathered it, knowing nothing could steal the warm happiness in her heart.
She remembered everything they had done that night, everything he had told
her.  Brains.  Finesse.  Marcus had always told her to be smart instead of
strong.  She looked up again.

   Scattered stalactites hung from the ceiling like stone spears, long and
sharp.  The rock here must have been mostly limestone, slowly worn away
over hundreds of years by the water.  Seri squinted at the protrusions. 
They looked brittle.  She could probably split the rock and bring one down,
but how would that help?

   She looked around at the walls that enclosed them, an idea beginning to
form in her mind.  She lifted her staff and dipped the end into a tight
swirl, condensing currents of invisible energy into a confusing matrix. 
This was one spell she could do, at least.  Delving wasn't difficult.  The
girls gave her wary glances but kept talking by the fire.  Seri wove the
final layers of the spell and felt a tingling flash as it completed.  She
reached out, as if with an invisible hand, a new sense that rested
comfortably alongside all her others, and *felt* all around her.

   The rock underneath them was solid dolomite.  The stream wouldn't dig
much further.  Scattered cracks ran along the ceiling above.  She could
feel them in the darkness.  Shale and more limestone formed solid walls on
either side of the stream.  Seri turned, letting the head of her staff
guide her like the nose of a bloodhound.  Everything was quite solid,
except for in one place...there.

   She let her staff drop and walked over to the wall.  The girls grew
quiet, looking at her curiously.  Seri put her hands out and felt the cool
stone.  Her fingers felt only rock but in her mind she could see the space
opening up on the other side.  The rock was only a couple feet thick, but
solid - she couldn't get through that.  Not without some help at least.

   "Stand over there," she said, gesturing with her staff.  The girls
didn't argue as they got up and shuffled to where the far wall met the
stream.  They huddled together, cold and forlorn but with faint stirrings
of hope on their faces.

   Seri took a step back, then raised the staff over her head.  The fire
blazed with new life, crackling hotly.  There, now she could see again. 
She looked up and picked her target - one of the biggest stalactites,
thicker than the others, but still thin enough that she was sure she could
manage it.  She swung her staff again and gestured, and the girls looked
around curiously at the swirl of air but saw nothing.

   "Don't look right at the light," Seri said.  She stepped on a rock to
the side and pointed her staff upwards, angled slightly towards the big
stalactite.  A tight beam of red light lanced out from the end, as bright
as the sun, slashing into the rock at the base and cutting a white-hot line
into the edge like a razor.

   Seri squinted against the glare.  The stone far above began to ooze from
the heat.  She took a careful step back so no molten rock would land on
her. A better mage might have been able to transmute a cross-section of the
rock to mud or something, but that was actually harder.  It was simpler to
burn something than to try to change its essence.  Seri sent more power
into her beam, cutting at an oblique angle into the stalactite.  The other
girls cowered near the water, hiding their eyes.  The rock overhead began
to glow in a menacing spectrum of orange-red like metal under a
blacksmith's hammer.  Seri kept her beam going, feeding it power, feeling
the stone give way.

   It only took a few minutes.  A low groan and a crack was the only
warning she had.  The enormous stalactite shifted briefly, then plummeted
straight towards them.  The girls screamed, but the rock suddenly flew to
the side, rolling wildly and leaving drips of molten rock on the ramp of
air Seri had conjured.  The stalactite smashed into the wall at the thin
place with crack as loud as thunder and a cloud of dust blew out to obscure
the room.

   Seri coughed and waved her hand in front of her face.  The dust was
choking and the room smelled like a forge.  She waved her staff and
conjured a slight breeze, shifting the air about to move the dust out over
the water.

   "Seri!" Alyssia was calling out.  Seri could hear her and the other
girls coughing.  She made her way over to them.  The afterimage of her beam
was still burned onto her sight.

   "Everyone ok?" she asked.

   "That...that was awesome!" Alyssia was recovering from her cough,
looking up at Seri again with awe.  "You melted the rock and then flung
that big hunk of rock to the side!  Wow!" She looked over at where the
clearing air had revealed an enormous crack in the wall.  "And you broke
right through the wall!"

   Seri smiled slightly, embarrassed.  She didn't point out that she didn't
have the strength to be flinging big rocks about.  She had just used
gravity.  But the results were what mattered.  Finesse.  She breathed a
silent prayer of thanks to Marcus for that lesson.

   "It looks like there's some space on the other side," Selise said,
stepping over to peer into the crack.  "But...where does it go?"

   "Only one way to find out.  Unless you want to stay here," Seri said. 
Selise quickly shook her head, curly hair bouncing.  Seri looked around at
them one by one: Selise and Alyssia, the only two of them still clothed,
and Nelle and Nola, the pair of naked 10-year-olds still wearing frightened
looks and Nola with her arm still in the sling.  They looked like a pretty
sorry troupe, but for the first time there was hope in their eyes.  Seeing
her break open the wall had restored at least some of their confidence in
her.  Right now they looked like they would follow her anywhere.

   "Ok, just stay behind me," Seri said.  "We don't really have any food
and we can't take the water with us, but this tunnel will probably lead us
out.  I have some spells that will help at least, but we'll still have to
be careful."

   They nodded as a group.  With a flourish of her staff, Seri produced a
light that hovered in the air just over her shoulder, then turned and began
to wiggle her way through the crack in the wall.  There was no point in
even casting her wards - there were too many monsters that dwelt
underground for it to statistically matter.  She'd have to deal with any
threats as they came up.  The crack was a tight fit - she barely made it to
the other side, but luckily she was the largest of the girls.  The others
shouldn't have as much trouble.

   The other end of the crack opened up into a jagged passage with an
uneven floor.  Selise came right after her, then helped the other girls
through one by one, taking extra care with Nola's wounded arm.  Once they
were all through Seri began to lead the way, staff held in front of her and
the harsh white glare of the light on her shoulder casting sharp shadows
into every nook and cranny of the narrow tunnel.

   The floor rose and fell and the tunnel twisted in irregular patterns -
sometimes up, sometimes down, or spiraling diagonally in crazy patterns. 
The rocks were damp with water, and dripped in places into tiny pools.  The
space must have also been carved out by the flow of water over a long
period of time, Seri thought.  Small openings covered in pairs of tiny
stalactites and stalagmites sometimes leered from the sides of the tunnels
like open jaws, but few were large enough to enter.  The passage forked
again and again, and Seri picked the bigger tunnel whenever she had to
choose.  They clambered over the irregular floor where it rose and fell,
and ducked under the ceilings when they came down to cramp the space.

   Seri thanked the gods she wasn't claustrophobic.  The other girls seemed
to be doing ok too.  The miles stretched on in uneventful silence, except
for the occasional slip or stubbed toe.  At least the tunnel was going up
more often than it was going down.  Seri breathed a silent prayer to the
gods that they might actually get out of this.

   Eventually the tunnel levelled out, flattening and widening to a
comfortable diameter.  Seri's spells had kept the damp and the chill away,
but they were all winded from their long march and breathing heavily.  The
passage had just emptied out into a connected pair of round chambers when
Seri called a halt.

   "Let's stop here," Seri said.  She felt like she could keep going but
the girls looked tired.  They weren't used to a life of marching and
training like she was.

   "We can rest a bit before we go on," she said, taking a seat on a flat
rock by the wall.

   "I'm so hungry I could eat my shirt," Selise grumbled.  "Is this tunnel
even going to lead us out, Seri?"

   Seri shrugged.  "I don't know the answer to that any more than you do. I
can only delve a little ways.  It seems to be going up though."

   "Up into the mountains," Selise said.  "I don't even know which
direction we're headed now."

   "West, still," Seri said, after casting a brief spell.  "Close enough.
I'm open to ideas if you have a better one."

   Selise shook her head as she sat on another rock.  She sighed and pulled
her bare feet up to begin rubbing them.

   "I have to pee," Nelle announced, looking embarrassed.

   "You can go in there," Seri said, gesturing to the narrow opening to the
other chamber.  A few points of stone lined the gap but it was wide enough
to get through, and the chamber looked almost as large as the one they were
in.  The naked 8-year-old squeezed herself through the gap and disappeared.

   Seri's feet ached too, but she was used to that, so she just sat
quietly. Her spells could keep her going for days probably, enduring
without food or drink right up the point where she dropped dead.  It was a
dangerous line to walk, using magic to suppress the feelings of her body's
needs.  If she did it for all 5 of them she would become exhausted that
much quicker.  They would have to find the way out soon.

   Alyssia and Nola had taken seats on the floor a bit away from them. 
Seri glanced at Selise, sitting across from her.  Maybe if she could get
the girl talking, she could do something about that look of resigned
hopelessness on her face.

   "So, Selise, you were in the orphanage back at Alara?  With Nelle and
Nola?"

   "Yeah," Selise said.  "I lived there a long time.  The other girls only
came last year."

   "If you don't mind me asking, what happened to your parents?"

   "They died when I was young.  A plague.  "

   "Oh.  Sorry." Seri felt herself blush.

   Selise just shrugged.  "It's ok.  I barely remember them now."

   "Any other family?" Seri asked.  "Uncles?  Grandparents?  Brothers?"

   Selise shook her head.  "No.  How about you?"

   "All of my family's back on my farm in Bithnia," Seri said.  "My Ma and
Pa and all my brothers.  Did you have any friends at the orphanage?"

   "Just Nelle and Nola," Selise said.  "I guess I kind of became like
their big sister."

   "Any boyfriends?" Seri asked.

   "Boyfriends?  You mean the men?"

   Seri blinked in confusion.  "The men?"

   "Yeah.  The men that always came."

   Selise saw Seri's confused expression and elaborated.

   "Lots of men in the town had, well, arrangements --with miss Mathas, the
matron at the orphanage.  They paid her for time with the girls."

   "Oh." Seri could barely manage the syllable.  It seemed inadequate.  She
swallowed the lump in her throat.

   "How many, er...men came for you?"

   Selise shrugged again.  It seemed a common gesture for her.  "Two or
three a week usually.  I had my regulars.  Usually it was the girls a few
years older than me that got the men, but some really liked the girls my
age."

   Seri could relate.  The many instructors and commanders at the academy
usually had their picks of the girls too.  Seri had sucked and fucked her
way through her mage training just like all the other girls there.  It was
hard to avoid when you had to wear a skimpy uniform that showed off your
cunt all day.

   Unsure of what to say, she plucked nervously at the frayed strap of
cloth around her waist that used to be the belt of her skirt.  The small
pouch was still hanging from it.  That and her staff was all she had left.

   "Is that a coinpurse?" Selise asked, pointing at the pouch.  "I wouldn't
figure that mages would need to carry any coin."

   "Oh, no.  It's magic.  It's uh...here, let me show you." Seri pulled the
little pouch into her hands and sent a tiny trickle of power into it.  It
grew in her hands to a sack the size of a watermelon.

   "Wow!" Selise laughed.  "That's amazing.  How does it do that?"

   "It's made of dreamcloth and infused with magic.  The spell sort of
folds the space inside to make it smaller, like folding a piece of paper.
It's even bigger than it looks on the inside."

   "Why do you need all that space?  I thought mages had soldiers to carry
stuff around for them."

   "Usually," Seri said.

   "What's in it?" Selise leaned over as if to peek, but inside the neck of
the sack was only an impenetrable darkness.  Solid things were unharmed
when put in the bag, but some things like light it couldn't retain at all.

   "Well, they gave me one of these because I had to carry a lot of...erm,
books."

   "Books?" Selise looked confused.  "Why would you need to carry a lot of
books?"

   "To study," Seri said.  "The maesters at the library wanted me to
continue to take notes for them from some of the volumes they had assigned
me."

   "Library?" Selise's puzzled look deepened.  "You worked at a library? 
You're not a battlemage?  Why did they send you out here?"

   Seri felt herself blush.  She still didn't really know why they had sent
such a weak magic user like herself on a combat mission.  She had just
opened her mouth to admit as much when a scream came from the other
chamber.

   All four girls leaped to their feet.  Seri grabbed her staff and rushed
to the opening to peek through.  Nelle was flat on her stomach on the
ground, with some kind of enormous grublike thing squirming on her back and
keeping her pinned to the floor.  It was as big as she was.

   "Eeeeek!" The scream came from just behind her.  Seri whirled around,
staff at the ready.  Alyssia had been bowled over by another of the
creatures.  It squirmed over her body as she struggled on the ground.  A
shadow fell from the ceiling, and Selise dropped too.  Seri looked up and
saw a host of writhing, maggot-like bugs squirming out of a hole in the
ceiling, ready to drop on them all.

   Heart pounding, she rolled to the side, barely avoiding one of the bugs
as it hurtled down through the space where she had been standing.  It
thwacked onto the floor, but recovered quickly, turning to face her.  It
was something like a cross between a caterpillar and a maggot, but with a
long body of identical white segments topped by a head with several bulging
insectile eyes and twitching antennae.  As it reared up, Seri saw the line
of disgusting orifices and tiny tentacles that lined the underside, and
knew what it was.

   She leaped to the side again, avoiding the bug as it pounced.  They were
shockingly quick.  The other girls were screaming, struggling on the
ground. More bugs had dropped down to join the fray, a writhing mat of
horrific bug bodies crawling all over them.  More were scrambling along the
ceiling towards Seri, ready to throw themselves at her.  She had only a
moment.

   Her training kicked in.  Everything she knew about these monsters
flashed through her mind in a moment.  Air.  She erected a field of it in
front of her, just strong enough to buy her a few more seconds.  The bugs
leaped and hit the field, grabbing it with sticky feet and moving along it
like an invisible wall.  Force.  She swung her staff and screamed wildly.
The bugs flew back as if smashed with an enormous hammer.  Fire.  She
pointed her staff and a gout of flame roared out of the A'sham on the end,
immolating the pile of bugs.  They writhed and squealed with high-pitched
voices as they burned.

   More were coming in.  A flood of them.  There were other holes they
hadn't noticed.  Seri shouted as she swirled her staff.  Close the holes.
Easy.  Seri reached out with her power and found the rock, felt it like
putty in her hands.  With an act of will, she sealed them all shut in an
instant.

   Bugs were leaping against her barrier, smashing into it with the force
of their bodies.  Seri felt it give way, the spell dissolving, but she was
ready.  She struck out with a blast of ice, freezing half a dozen of the
bugs solid, then followed with a slash of air that shattered their bodies
into hundreds of twitching fragments.

   Power flowed through her.  More power than she had ever felt.  It came
so easily, as if giving a tiny shove to a boulder and letting it roll
downhill.  She swung her staff decisively, slamming a bug against the rocky
wall with a satisfying splat, then pointed it at a large rock.  The rock
leaped into the air, then hurtled at a charging pair of bugs as she thrust
her staff at them.

   The bugs were slowing down but there were still more on the ceiling. 
Seri gestured with her staff, and sharp spikes of earth suddenly slashed
down like spears, impaling the bugs still crawling on the ceiling.  They
squealed and writhed as they died, skewered, green blood dripping from
their bodies.

   The other girls were still overwhelmed.  Seri fed her power into a
complicated matrix, an elaborate network of twisting flows all arranged
with perfect precision, then unleashed it.  A sphere of purple energy
appeared in the air and rocketed towards where the other three girls were
struggling on the ground under a mountain of bugs.  The sphere slipped over
them all, and they visibly slowed, the flow of their time slowed down by an
order of magnitude.  Now Seri could breathe.  She looked around for more
bug stragglers, but she had taken care of them all.

   Another scream.  Nelle!  Seri rocketed past the girls caught in the web
of time and darted through the opening into the other chamber.  Three of
the grubs had the little girl's naked body pinned tightly against the rock,
coiled around her as they enthusiastically raped her.  One had covered her
head entirely, squeezing tightly.  Seri knew that one of the cocks that the
bugs had on each and every segment of their body would be buried in the
girl's mouth.  Another was around her waist and crotch, jerking as it
thrust one of its cocks into the little girl's pussy.  She didn't need to
look carefully to know the last one was throbbing eagerly inside her tight
asshole.

   Aiming carefully, Seri used a pincer of air to rip away the top bug from
the girl's head, and then hurtle it at the wall.  It thwacked wetly against
the rock and tumbled down, not moving.  She did the same for the other two,
then rushed up to where the naked 8-year-old was quivering on the ground.

   "Nelle!  Are you ok?  Look at me.  Did any of them...did they cum inside
you?"

   The little girl shook her head, coughing violently.  Seri helped her sit
up.  Nelle hacked some more and then drew in a long, ragged breath.  Maybe
she had been quick enough, Seri thought.  The girl wasn't coughing up any
cum.  Leaving her there, she stood and raced into the other chamber.  The
purple field was still active.  Seri conjured a smaller one and stuck it
against the wall, then began picking bugs out of the slow-moving mass and
hurtling them into it one by one.  There were at least 15.  When she had
thrown them all into the other field, she pointed her staff and roasted the
whole lot of them with the roaring blaze that poured out of the end.

   The bugs squealed pitifully as they died.  Seri turned and released the
fields, and the girls on the ground suddenly started moving at normal speed
again, squirming and coughing on the rocky floor.

   "Selise!" Seri stooped down and helped the girl roll over.  Selise was
coughing, expelling sticky runners of gooey mucus that stuck to her lips
like phlegm.

   "Oh shit --" Seri muttered.  Selise hadn't been so lucky.  She moved
quickly and checked the other two girls.  Alyssia had sat up and was
shaking.  The top of her blue dress had been eaten away as if by acid,
exposing her flat chest.  A few sticky grey deposits had been spurted
haphazardly onto the bare skin.  The bugs had enjoyed themselves quite a
lot in the few minutes they had had, apparently.  Nola was even worse off,
having been unable to struggle much with her arm.  She was still face-down
on her belly on the rock, trembling.  Seri could see the mess of gooey bug
semen that they had left seeping in her asscrack and around her cunt.

   "What...what were those fucking things?" Alyssia had drawn her legs up
tight to her chest as she sat, her eyes wide and haunted.  Her chest wasn't
the only part of her dress that had been partially dissolved.  The skirt
and sleeves were almost falling apart.

   "They're called Chiropedes," Seri said.  "They live and tunnel through
the earth.  Those were just babies though.  The adults are bigger."

   "Just babies...bigger ones --" Alyssia's eyes were simmering.  She ran a
finger over her bare chest and came away with a sticky deposit of cum. 
Disgusted, she flung it away.

   "They're not all that common around here --" Seri muttered.  "There must
be a new nest.  Chiropedes tend to have large broods.  These were juveniles
but they become sexually mature very early." Seri gestured at the charred,
curled-up corpses of the grubby insects all around them.  "Adult chiropedes
are solitary but their young tend to gang up and overwhelm with numbers. 
The excretions from the underbellies of their segments dissolve soft
material like clothing.  There was a town called Erunya that was taken over
by Chiropedes.  I had to write the report."

   Seri's head was stuffed with facts, and they tumbled out in a lecturing
tone as she went on, not noticing the other girls' slack-mouthed looks of
horror.

   "They're not too picky about which orifices they use, but they raped the
girls pretty much nonstop until they were pregnant.  The incident gave us a
lot of good data.  Chiropede ejaculate volumes range from .5 deciliters in
juveniles up to 5 deciliters in full-grown specimens.  Once impregnation
occurs gestation takes place over the ensuing 8 weeks, with the size of the
brood tending to produce extreme distension of the belly while-"

   "SHUT UP!  SHUT THE FUCK UP SERI!" Alyssia screamed, leaping to her
feet. "These fucking Chir...Chiro...fucking monsters are all over these
tunnels, and you lead us right into their fucking lair!"

   "Not their lair," Seri protested.  "I didn't know what was down here-"

   "Well you SHOULD have fucking known!  You're the one with the magic!"
Alyssia was shaking, fists clenched.  Bug cum formed flecks of angry
spittle as the tiny 9-year-old girl shrieked at Seri, advancing on her as
if she would hit her.

   "It doesn't work like that.  I can only ward against one monster at a
time-"

   "Shut the fuck up!  You and your fucking excuses.  Your gods-damned
excuses are why our families are getting raped up there by a hive of bugs,
Seri!" Alyssia's face was purple with rage.  "What the fuck are we doing
down here?  Since we joined you everything has just gotten worse and worse!
Now we're stuck in this pit with these fucking Chir...these fucking bugs
all around us!"

   Alyssia reared back and kicked one of the burned bugs savagely.

   "How much longer until more of them come out of those holes, Seri?  God,
I could feel all their gross little bug dicks all over me.  Their
disgusting little bug cum on my skin!  You're a mage!  You're supposed to
protect us!  From...from this!"

   She swiped at her bare chest and flicked the semen angrily at Seri.

   "Don't yell at her!" Selise shouted.  "She's just a librarian!"

   "A librarian?" Alyssia whirled on Selise, fuming.  "A fucking librarian?
You're telling me we're TRAPPED down here with a gods-damned LIBRARIAN?!"

   Alyssia shrieked with rage.  She swiped the remaining runners of bug goo
off her skin as if it was burning, then grabbed the hem of her dress and
yanked it up over her head and threw it to the ground.

   "Disgusting bugs getting their slimy juices all over it!  Never again!"
She stood there, naked and shaking, then looked at Seri.  "My mom's going
to end up a little breeding bug whore now thanks to you.  But I'm not
ending up like that!  I can't believe I looked up to you Seri!  You can
find your way out of this little bug-infested shithole by yourself!"

   Alyssia whirled and stalked out of the stone chamber, back the way they
had come.  Selise looked on with wide eyes, and Nella and Nola were
sniffling on the verge of tears.

   "If there's a den of these things we don't...really want to go on...do
we?" Selise asked, her voice faltering.

   "This is the only tunnel so far that has kept heading up," Seri said. 
"We'll be fine." For the first time in a long while, she felt confident. 
She had done exactly as she had been trained to do.  She had beaten back
the monsters, ripped them apart, froze them and burned them and sliced them
to pieces.  Her magic had come to her with a greater clarity than it ever
had before.  She had...she had won.  She felt like she could do anything.
Alyssia could do what she wanted.  Seri didn't need her.

   "Did you see me blast them apart?  I said we'll be fine!" Seri said to
the girls' doubtful looks.  "If there are any more Chiropedes I'll do the
same thing to them!  This is what mages train for."

   "Yeah, but --" Selise wiped a trickle of bug semen from her lips, then
spread her hands helplessly.  "Ok Seri.  If you keep going we'll follow
you."

   Seri nodded.  As they should.  Their only hope was to stick close to a
mage.  She could get them out.  If any monsters crossed their path she'd
slaughter them too.  Maybe if she had been in charge of the battle instead
of Varus she could have proven herself there too.  She would have put more
flares in the sky and had the mages work together to conjure a lightning
storm that would have fried all the bugs when they were still in the air.

   "Come on," she said, gesturing for the girls to follow.  They all
marched towards the exit with Seri in the lead.  She decided not to worry
about the Conversion effects of the Chiropede semen on the girls.  Exposure
brought some subtle changes to the womb, but they took a while.  One or two
spurts of bug juice wasn't the end of the world.  Nothing else would happen
under her care anyway.  She felt like she had finally mastered all that she
had trained for.  Maybe they'd promote her to a battlemage when they got
back.  Seri, the hero of Alara.

   She liked the sound of that.



   ~*~



   Seri brushed her fingers lightly over her labia and shuddered.  The
other girls had dropped off to sleep after they made camp in an area where
the passage had widened.  Gods, she was so fucking horny.  She wouldn't
have admitted it, but she was.

   She had tried to banish the thoughts of her rape in the hive, and
failed. All those Chrysilae crawling all over her, shoving their big bug
cocks inside her.  She shivered again and slipped a finger into the juicy
space between her lips.  She was wet just remembering it.  The bugs hadn't
been at her very long, but it was long enough for the Conversion effect to
begin to take root.  Partially converted girls were rare, and sought-after
objects of study.  If Seri got out of here, the Maesters would want to
inspect every inch of her.  They'd take measurements of her body, her
breasts.  They'd examine her pussy and vagina.  They'd want to know if she
could still conceive human babies.  They'd probably test that themselves --

   Seri added another finger, and groaned as she lay on the rock.  Was she
already pregnant?  They had cum inside her and sealed her up to let the
semen marinate in her insides, changing her.  She had washed it out, but
who knew?  Maybe there was a brood of bug maggots squirming in her womb
right now.  Maybe her belly would begin growing fat over the next week,
confirming it.  If it did, if it did...she could scarcely entertain the
thought.  Maybe she'd go back.  It wouldn't be so bad.  There must be a
reason that girls didn't want to come back after being turned into little
rape toys and breeders for the monsters.  She could walk up into the
mountains, naked as she was now, present herself to the hive.  They'd swarm
all over her, pick her up, seal her in another of those cells and then...

   She shook her head firmly.  No.  Not again.  She just needed a
distraction to keep her mind off this, to keep from thinking how good it
would feel to have a bug cock shoved inside her right now, thrusting madly
and twitching and finally swelling up and spewing a creamy froth of insect
sperm deep into her pussy.  She took a deep breath.  No.  She pulled her
fingers out and forced herself to look down at what she had been sketching.

   For a moment, she didn't even recognize it.  She had been sketching with
one hand while her mind wandered idly.  Now a young girl her own age stared
back at her from the page, naked, with her mouth twisted in a cry of
passion as a Chrysilae mounted her from behind.  Her waist was sealed in a
tight ring of immobilizing resin.  It could have been any of her mage
sisters, right now.  She had taken out her sketchbook with a vague notion
of drawing something from her experiences that the Maesters could use. 
Maybe a contribution to the Factorum.  But this was too real.  She
shuddered, looking at it.  The exultant look on the girl's face as the bug
crammed its thick, bulging cock into her tiny pussy and inseminated her
with a brood of insect young hit so close to home.  She swallowed the lump
in her throat, then firmly shoved the sketchbook back into her bag.

   Well, if sketching couldn't distract her, maybe reading could.  Sleep
was quite far off anyway.  She still felt the faint rush of adrenaline from
her victory over the Chiropedes.  She had beaten them off.  Her, the girl
everyone had always called weak.  She had done it all by herself.  Maybe
not before the other girls got a few loads of cum dumped in them, but
still. She felt more than a match for anything down here now.  She fumbled
in her sack and then pulled out the heavy tome.  She knew she was right on
the verge of deciphering its secrets.  They hovered so tantalizingly close.
She only needed a few more facts to bring it all into focus.

   She ignored the faint feeling of menace that always seemed to emanate
from the book, and opened it to a place near the end.  She was almost
there. The book wouldn't let her skip ahead, and she didn't try this time,
but she had almost made it there herself.  Just another few dozen pages --

   Seri read feverishly.  The woman in white who had corrupted the grand
ritual had disappeared, and her treachery took a long time to be
discovered. The monster's numbers had dwindled for a time, until they
realized that they could rape and breed the females of the other sentient
races.  Humans, of course, but also Elves, Felis, Lupoid, Canthis, and even
other races Seri didn't even recognize.  It took hundreds of years, but Aen
Sielle began to crumble.  The monsters had no females of their own kind to
breed with anymore, but they had found all the surrogates they needed. 
Girls of every non-Monstrum race were captured, enslaved, bred
relentlessly. Entire new generations of Monstrum were conceived and born in
their wombs.

   The illustrations here almost put the Monstrum Factorum to shame.  The
rape pits were depicted in vivid detail.  The remaining mages of the time
had finally put together the pieces of what had happened.  They had retaken
some of the Monstrum strongholds and studied what they found.  The results
were all too familiar to Seri: pregnant girls, their bellies massive with
the monstrous young inside them, slavering for cock with an insatiable
need. The civilized peoples of Aen Sielle had been horrified.  The
discoveries threw their society into chaos.  Eventually, a grand council of
the last surviving mages and rulers had been convened.  Every kingdom of
the empire had been invited.  They needed a solution.  They needed a way to
reverse the effect, or at least to stalemate the endless hordes of monsters
entering the material world from the abyss.

   Here it was: the page showed an enormous circular chamber, ringed by
marching columns of ivory edged in gold filigree.  Hundreds of people were
gathered, all facing inwards toward the vast round table around which the
grand council was sitting.  An accounting of the meeting was written on the
opposite page in a bold, blocky script.  Seri's heart sank: she had seen
this a few times before in the book - a formal shorthand, the glyphs just
different enough that she couldn't make out more than one word in ten.  She
couldn't read it, at least not without a better reference.  If she were
back at the mage's academy she could have got one easily, but for now she
couldn't make out what had been decided at the council at all.

   Seri closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead.  It was so close.  The
answers were right here.  They must have found some solution, since the
world had returned to normalcy for several hundred years.  She needed to
know what it was.  Maybe they could do it again, force the monsters back to
the abyss, buy some desperately needed peace for a time.  Her head ached in
time with the throbbing in her pussy.  She tried to ignore both of them.

   Seri pulled the book close again and turned the page on a new chapter.
The title was a bold, flowing script of Elvish derivation:

   The Grand Consummation

   Her heart began to race.  This was the last chapter, the key to it all.
The pages felt heavy, as if made from lead, but they yielded under her
fingers.  This section appeared to be a pictorial.  At first she couldn't
make out the illustrations on the pages - they swirled in her head,
indistinct, as if refusing to take form, but as she peered closer at them
they seemed to come into focus.  Magical, of course, like the rest of the
book - reacting to her own ability like some of the arcane volumes she had
studied at the academy.  But this one felt...different, as if the images in
the book were conjured for her alone.

   The first was a picture of a little girl just a bit younger than her
being raped by a horse.  No, a Centaurum.  The form was vague, indistinct,
but what wasn't indistinct was the massively erect horse cock being rammed
into the girl's tiny little pussy, stretching it obscenely.  Her mouth was
frozen in the rictus of screaming pleasure and her belly was distended from
the shape of the bestial penis pressing against it from below.

   Silken webs bound the wrists and ankles of the little girl on the
opposite page.  She was snared in a web, her back stuck tightly to the
sticky strands with her legs pulled wide open.  More girls could be seen
all around her, their bodies covered by the hairy forms of giant spider
monsters.  Arachma.  The jutting protrusions of their flexible cocks were
buried in the soft pussies of the little girls they had captured for the
hive.  The picture was so real, so vivid.  It felt alive.  Seri could
almost hear the cries of tortured pleasure from the girls as they were
raped, inseminated with spider semen carrying thousands of fine eggs as
tiny as grains of sand.  The girl in the center was massively pregnant, the
paunch of her belly grown to a grotesque size.  How many spiderlings were
swarming in her gut, ready to hatch?  She looked ready to give birth.  The
exultant look on her face showed how much she anticipated the thought.

   The picture was so real that Seri could even make out the sweat on the
girl's forehead and the pre-birth juices glistening on the lips of her
pussy.  Seri swallowed and turned the pages.  More images.  Girls being
raped, subdued, bound, bred.  One showed a dozen girls in a rocky den, each
pregnant and mating enthusiastically with a Rapewolf.  Whores for the pack.
Their panting, heavy expressions illustrated how much they enjoyed having
their mate's thick doggy cocks crammed inside them.  Seri turned the pages
again.  Still more.  The pages felt heavier under her fingers as if the
magic was resisting her, but no matter how many she turned she didn't seem
to get any closer to the back of the book.  Girls in a beholder harem,
engaged in a twisted orgy with their master's eye tentacles and each other.
Girls twisted together chaotically with a writhing mass of tentacles, their
bodies bound together like a ball of yarn - an exotic Monstrum called a
Thrack.  Shapeshifters.  Chimera.  Org-reh.  Vile Buzzards.  Ettu.  Yetta.
Venoma.  The images went on, endless.  Seri flipped rapidly, panting, the
burning pulse in her pussy growing.  Girls twisted, bent over, penetrated
in every hole.  Seri reached up to wipe the sweat off her forehead.  Blood
thundered in her ears and her heart drummed in her chest like it would
burst.  The heat in her cunt raged like a volcano.  She slipped a finger
down and dipped it inside, then jerked as her pussy twitched wildly,
clamping down and sucking desperately at the lone digit, demanding more.

   Endless girls.  Endless monsters.  Species Seri didn't even know.  Each
one locked in coitus with an endless bounty of young human girls.  The
faces of the girls were ecstatic.  Their bellies bulged as they were pumped
full of the vile seed of every conceivable nightmare of the abyss, their
befouled wombs bearing the spawn of those who dominated them.  Seri slipped
another finger in up to the second knuckle and gasped despite herself.  Her
hands shook, barely able to keep the book propped up, turning pages
frantically.  Dozens of pages.  Hundreds.  They didn't end.  They never
repeated.  The rape went on and on.  The magic of the book practically
hummed along with the throbbing demand in her crotch.

   Seri stopped in shock, her fingers poised on the corner of the page.  A
girl.  Long auburn hair.  Green eyes.  Her age.  Naked as the day she was
born, with spittle glistening on her lips.

   It was her.

   Her body was twisted, glued to a pillar of rock by some kind of webbing.
Unmistakable spurts of cum were all over her.  Her belly was bulging, and
her face, her face...it was --

   Rapturous.

   A scream shattered the stillness of the cave.  Seri leaped to her feet,
her fingers still slick from probing her genitals.

   "Seri!" Selise was yelling frantically as she wrestled with a long, dark
form in the deep shadows left by the fading firelight.

   "It's the bugs!  It's...aaaagh!"

   More Chiropedes!  They were pouring in through holes in the rock. 
Juveniles, like before.  Seri had tested the rock before making camp.  They
must have spent all this time burrowing through.  Seri thought they had to
be older to do that.

   She grabbed her staff and swept it around her in a circle.  A force
field sprang into being, shimmering in the air.  She slammed the book back
into her sack and made it shrink as she clipped it to her belt, then turned
to face the enemy.

   A quick blast from her staff summoned a gout of fire, burning away the
horde of maggot-like bugs crawling towards her, but Seri instantly realized
that something was wrong.  Her magic felt tenuous, not strong like it had
during the last fight.  It slipped through her fingers like water.  If
anything it felt weakened, dampened, even by her own low standards.

   Her force field failed as the bugs pushed against it.  Seri screamed and
sliced at the bugs with a blade of air.  It cut into a few of them but
barely stemmed the tide.  The Chiropedes chittered in an advancing wall of
grubby bodies, as if sensing victory already.  Quicker than Seri could
track, one reared back and leaped at her, knocking her to the floor.  She
hit with a bang, smacking one of her elbows.  Dozens of disgusting legs
slithered all over her naked body as the creature scrabbled for purchase.
Seri shrieked and thrashed, revolted, and managed to roll out from under
the weight.  She felt around frantically in the gloom, and shouted when her
fingers closed around her staff again.  With the bugs just inches behind
her, she managed to leap to her feet.

   Heart pumping, adrenaline racing, Seri charged towards where the other
three girls were struggling on the floor.  They had been taken by surprise
in their sleep.  Why hadn't she warded for Chiropedes?  She had felt so
sure she could simply dispatch them again as she had done before.  Seri
channeled all her rage into a screeching battle cry, holding her staff by
the end and smashing it into the bug on top of Selise like a club.  With a
chittering sound of pain the bug flew off to the side.  Selise rolled over,
leaping to her feet with a haunted look in her eyes.  Seri conjured a wall
of fire to keep the rest of the bugs at bay while Selise smashed the pair
of bugs covering the twins with rocks and then picked them up and hurled
them bodily away.

   "Come on!" She yelled.  Selise had pulled the twins to their feet, and
they all took off running down the nearest passage.  Seri conjured a light
so they could see as they left the firelight behind them.

   "Not again," Nelle was murmuring, tears in her eyes as they sprinted
over the uneven surface.  "Please, not again."

   "Stay close Nelle," Selise panted.  "It'll be ok, just stay close."

   Seri reached out for her power to collapse the tunnel behind them...and
found nothing.  The weave of magic which suffused everything in the world
seemed as distant to her as fog, and nearly as insubstantial.  She pulled
it into herself, condensing a small amount of power, and forced it into a
wall of air just behind them.

   "Keep running!  I can't hold them off!" she yelled.  The girls didn't
need to be told.  They were already running for their lives, but their
progress was hampered by low shelves of rock, narrow corridors, and tight
ceilings.

   After ducking and crawling frantically through a chute speckled with
hundreds of tiny stalactites on the ceiling like teeth in a shark's maw,
they emerged on the other side into an open space.  A narrow precipice
lined the pit that stretched out to both sides in front of them, and the
far walls lay unseen outside of the light's radius.

   "Let's go!  We can't stop!" Seri gestured at the thin ledge of rock that
curved off to their right.  "We can follow that.  Just keep your back to
the wall and don't look down!"

   Selise looked doubtful, and the twins huddled against each other in
terror at the dark pit that they couldn't see the bottom of, but the sounds
of eager chittering echoing out of the tunnel behind them galvanized them
all into action.  Selise took the lead with the twins just behind her.  The
girls edged their way out onto the thin part of the ledge, keeping their
backs tight against the stone.  Seri followed just behind, keeping a
white-knuckled grip on her staff.

   "I think...I think it gets wider up there," Selise said, pointing off
into the darkness ahead.  "Yeah, it does.  Just a little bit further!"

   "I'm scared," Nola said, quivering as she halted her side-stepping gait
on the ledge.

   "You can do it Nola!  Don't think about anything else, just put one foot
in front of the other, just like that...good." Selise was inching her way
along ahead of them, but she had paused to let the twins catch up slightly.
They were crossing the part of the ledge where it was narrowest.  The eager
sounds of horny bugs were growing louder behind them.

   A sharp crack and a scream sent Seri's heart leaping into her mouth. 
The ledge split and fell out from under them.  Seri grabbed on for
something, anything as she fell.  Something soft was in her fingers, and
she hung on for dear life as the world spun around her.

   Their pitched screams echoed through the vast cavern.  Rock scraped
Seri's face as she dangled.  She hadn't fell - she had hold of Nola's leg,
somehow.  Selise bumped into her side, twisting precariously just like
Seri. They were both holding onto the little girl's legs.

   "Aaaaaah!" Screamed the girl.  "Nooooo!" Her sister was screaming just
above her.

   "Don't let go Nola!" Selise yelled.  "Hang on!  You can do it!"

   Seri looked up.  Nola had a tight grip on a rock with the fingers of one
hand.  Her other was still wrapped in the sling.

   "I'm...I'm slipping!" Nola shouted, weeping hysterically.  Her hand was
shaking, fingers inching towards the edge.  She couldn't hold the weight of
all of them with just one hand.  Seri cursed her weakness: why couldn't she
have healed it all the way?  The little girl could probably hold on with
both hands, long enough for them to get out of this anyway.

   "No!  Keep holding on Nola!" Selise shouted.  "We can...we can climb
up...just a little bit --" Selise reached out as she dangled from Nelle's
leg, trying to get a grip on the irregular rock wall.

   A piercing shriek rang above them and the ledge suddenly dropped away
above them.  The world spun around her.  Fear froze Seri's heart like an
icicle.  They were going to die.  Some small part of her managed to stay
calm though, to remember her training.  She spun as she fell, but still
managed a gesture with her staff.  An easy spell.  A simple matrix. 
Something even she could do.

   The impact smashed Seri in the chest hard, knocking the wind out of her.
She rolled off the invisible surface onto the rock.  The bouncing thuds
were audible as each of the other girls landed on a cushion of air, hard
enough to be painful but enough to keep them safe.  Seri wretched and
finally managed to draw in a ragged breath of air.  They had practiced
falling at the academy.  Seri couldn't levitate so she had to make do with
half-measures.  She had hated it but it had saved her life.

   "We have to...have to go --" she coughed, getting shakily to her feet.
She could hear the crawling and chittering of the bugs high above them. 
The Chiropedes wouldn't be stopped by the cliff wall.  The other girls had
fared a little better than Seri, and got to their feet quickly.  Hearts
pumping hot with fear they picked the nearest exit and ran for their lives.

   Seri's muscles burned.  Her chest ached where she had taken the impact.
Blood thundered in her ears.  Still she ran, bare feet pounding the stone,
leading the way with the light of her staff.  She could hear the girls
scrambling after her, goaded by the sounds echoing up the corridor behind
them.  The rock was flat, the tunnel wide.  Seri screeched to a halt when
they came suddenly to a fork.  The tunnel split into three separate
corridors here.

   "Which way?" asked Selise, her eyes wide with fear.  She looked
nervously behind them and winced at the chittering sounds coming from the
shadows.  The twins held each other, terrified.

   "I don't know...I think --" Seri almost panicked, but decided to try
something.  She swept her staff in a gesture, shaping her magic into the
form she wanted.  It was a tough spell, with a difficult structure - like a
crystal with layers that had to be applied bit by bit.  Seri built up the
spell and then unleashed it.  A blue glow suffused the air briefly, then
faded out.  Now she knew.

   "This way," she said, feeling a renewed sense of confidence as she
gestured with her staff.  The girls followed her down the middle passage.
Immediately it began sloping down.  The sounds of the Chiropedes were close
behind now, their dozens of little legs pumping their bodies at a fast clip
along the stone.  Seri could almost see them: the disgusting little
segmented bodies with the hard carapace on the back of each, almost like a
moving spine.  The systems of their body were distributed, almost entirely
self-sufficient in each segment.  Like a worm, they could be split in two
and each piece could heal and grow a new head and become a separate
creature.  Seri tried not to think about the other parts of their anatomy
that were even more revolting.

   Feet pounded on stone.  The panting breaths of all four of them filled
the tight space of the passage.  Seri tried to push away the niggling
little doubts in the back of her mind, the uncomfortable certainty that she
wasn't really strong enough for divination, that her spell shouldn't have
succeeded.  It did succeed, and that was all that had mattered.  Such
magical knowledge was inerrant.  It had showed her the way out, assured her
it was close by.  All they needed to do was keep following this tunnel, and
they would be free.  Magic didn't know how to lie.

   The tunnel suddenly opened up into a wide chamber, big enough for a
house.  Echoes rebounded off the distant walls and unseen ceiling.

   "Wait...stop...need to rest --" Selise lurched to a halt beside Seri and
rested her hands on her knees, wheezing.  She was exhausted.  They all
were. Seri lifted up her staff and flooded the room with light from her
staff.

   "A dead end?!" Nelle cried disbelievingly.  They all looked around,
their panic growing.  The chamber was round, with a high ceiling, and
totally empty.  There were no exits.

   "Fuck!" Seri cursed, whirling around.  The Chiropedes were entering the
room like a white flood of maggots, crawling up the walls and ceiling. 
Gods, how many were there?

   Seri brought her staff around in front of her, condensing magical energy
from the ether as quickly as she could.  She wove it into a quick dome of
air that covered them all.  It wouldn't hold for long, she knew.  She
shifted the currents of power flowing through her and wove a new layer of
fire.  A brilliant orange flash blinded them all as the outside surface of
the field ignited into a roaring-hot fire.

   The bugs that had been ready to leap on them pulled back, chittering
wildly, crawling over each other in a writhing mass.  There were so many.
The other girls had huddled up close to her back, shaking with fear as they
watched the bugs lurking just beyond the heat of the flames.  Their alien
sounds were eager, hungry - ready to leap on their prey, to subdue them, to
rape them ceaselessly.

   Seri was panting.  She struggled under the weight of the magical flow
that powered the fire, but she felt it slipping from her grasp.  She wasn't
strong enough.  She'd have to think of something else.

   "Seri, look!" Selise was tugging her shoulder as she tried to
concentrate.  Seri spared a glance, squinting through the fire.

   "It's an opening!" Nelle squealed.  The small hole was about 15 feet off
the ground, just barely large enough to fit them.  The shadows of the rock
had made it impossible to see before.

   "Move together!" Seri shouted.  They ran as a group, Seri maintaining
her defensive field.  When they reached the wall the girls began to climb.
Nelle went first, then Selise helped boost Nola up so Nelle could catch her
good arm and help pull her up.

   "Hurry!" Seri could feel her power petering out, like a candle flame on
the verge of being snuffed.  All she needed was a few more seconds.  Just a
little bit more.  Tears were leaking from her eyes from the glare of the
fire, and she was shaking with the strain.

   Beneath the sounds of the crackling fire and the eager bugs, a deep
rumble began to build.  Seri almost thought she was imagining it until the
loose rocks by her feet began to shake.  She could feel the pulsing of the
rock with her bare feet.  The earthquake grew quickly in intensity until
eventually the whole chamber was shaking.

   They all screamed in terror as the rock wall exploded.  The girls
toppled off the wall, falling in a heap.  A slab of rock slammed into Seri
and she flew to the side, her staff torn from her fingers.  She looked up,
and froze with terror.

   An enormous chiropede had burst through the wall.  An adult.  Dozens of
segments, each as big as a horse.  It roared into the chamber, moving like
the spine of a giant come to life.

   The girls screamed as they clutched each other, witnessing this new
horror.  The worm reared up in front of them, regarding them with the
disgusting insect eyes studded all over its massive head.  Its antenna
twitched hungrily, testing the air with its alien senses.  They had made
such a racket in the tunnels that they had drawn the attention of the big
daddy Chiropede himself.  The juveniles were his own brood.

   Seri's spells had failed when the staff was knocked from her hand.  She
was helpless.  Raw horror paralyzed her muscles as she looked up at the
underbelly of the creature: each segment of the Chiropede sported a gooey
cavity underneath it, just wide enough for a girl and lined on both sides
with crawling tentacles.  The mucus lining the fleshy walls was so sticky
that anyone caught in that gap could never escape until the beast let them
go.

   The worm's front section reached the ceiling.  It hovered over them for
just a moment, but it felt like an eternity.  Four segments were above
them, each with open cavities, glistening like gaping vaginas, and in the
fifth Seri could see a struggling form: Alyssia.  She was trapped with her
back stuck tightly into the cavity, held there like a bug trapped on
flypaper.  Her naked body glistened wetly with juices, and the dozens of
tentacles around the grotesque lips of the opening were slithering all over
her, dipping into her mouth.  A thick girth of rigid purple flesh was
pumping hard into her vagina.  Alyssia was shaking her head, eyes wild with
fear and her screams blocked by the thrusting flesh in her mouth.

   Seri couldn't move.  She couldn't act.  Her doom fell like a hammerblow.
The Chiropede slammed down on top of them, and Seri was crushed by sticky
flesh.  It rolled her along the rumbling rock floor like a toy.  She
couldn't see.  She couldn't breathe.  This was the end.  She would have
thought it would break all her bones and leave her for dead, but her
education as a mage had taught her that a different fate was in store for
her.  Hot, sticky goop and the horrible reek of flesh enfolded her, and she
felt a tight feeling against her back.  The ground dropped away again. 
Rubbery lips of flesh had pinned her arms and legs to her sides.  She was
trapped.  She opened her mouth and screamed as the nightmare surrounded
her, but felt thick tentacles of flesh thrust their way across her cheeks
and past her lips.  They were all over her, gliding like slippery slugs
over her naked 12-year-old body, caressing it hungrily.  She felt a
questing touch press against her pussy lips and stiffened in shock.  At the
base of every cavity was one of the beast's many cocks - a 2-foot affair at
least 4 inches around, hard but flexible enough to wiggle into the tight
space of a little girl's vagina.  The glans of the turgid organ wiggled
against Seri's pussy lips, pressing them aside while she struggled and
screamed.  When the beast felt it was well-positioned, it rammed the thick
organ straight into her cunt with a powerful thrust, jolting her hips
painfully.  Seri gasped in shock at the massive intruder and a tentacle in
her mouth took the opportunity to squirm into her throat.

   The wailing of the other girls cut off one by one as they got the same
treatment.  Dozens of tentacles, coiling on the tight flesh of the captured
little girls, squirming into their open mouths.  Bestial rods of jutting
flesh slammed into their quivering pussies.  Seri could feel them
struggling hopelessly against the creature.

   The world spun and rock rumbled around them as the beast dug into the
earth again.  It could burrow through rock and rape all of its victims at
the same time without breaking a sweat.  Darkness covered Seri, a darkness
filled with the sensations of hot, juicy flesh covering her body, of
squirming limbs writhing over her skin, of the pounding beat of engorged
tentacles wiggling in her mouth and the animal thrusting of the throbbing
cock slamming into her.  One intrepid tentacle slipped underneath her
buttocks, tickling her asshole.  Seri struggled and shrieked around the
flesh filling her mouth, but that just seemed to excite the thing.  The
tentacle pushed hungrily past her sphincter and dug into the gripping heat
of her anus.

   Her world spun.  Her head slammed back and forth from the pulsing girths
in her mouth.  Her pelvis was jolted, rammed enthusiastically by the insect
phallus in her cunt.  Her mind shattered.  It was all her nightmares come
true.  It was every horror she had ever feared.  She had failed utterly. 
All the girls who had relied on her would be broodmothers now for insect
spawn.

   And she would never see Marcus again.

   Rising heat exploded in her brain, a sudden orgasm from the violent
motion of her rape.  Her muscles clenched and she struggled hysterically,
and it was all useless.  The roar of crushing rock filled her ears.  The
tight grasp of the fleshy cavity and its mucus kept her locked in place as
the worm burrowed through the earth.  Ecstasy lanced like a lightning bolt
up her spine, shockwaves driven by the pulsing drumbeat of pleasure in her
pussy.  She could feel the tentacles in her mouth swell up, and a frothing
gush of gooey syrup flooded into her mouth.  Seri swallowed madly - it was
that or choke - as she rode the waves of bliss.  Throbbing flesh swelled up
delightfully inside her, stretching the tight tunnel of her little girl
pussy, and Seri felt the warm rush of insect semen spew up into her
insides. Hot, tingling, utterly satisfying, a creamy rush of buttery seed
that flowed into her womb and filled her belly with warmth.

   The spent tentacles slipped out.  Seri felt sloppy runners of bug semen
and saliva on her chin.  New flesh took their place, ramming straight in,
filling her mouth and cunt without missing a single beat.  The tentacle in
her asshole coiled and squirmed like a worm and then tightened up madly,
and she felt heat spewing up into her asshole as well.  Another took its
place.  Seri's shrieking was muffled by bulging flesh.  Her cunt shivered
with delight at the thrusting intrusions of tight, slippery meat, which
stayed tightly erect no matter how many times it ejaculated into her.  The
sound of grinding rock was deafening.  She lost herself.  She was falling,
plummeting headfirst into an abyss of unreality, a space filled with a
seething storm of lightning ecstasy.

   Her next orgasm crashed into her like a peal of thunder.  She shook. 
She cried out with pitiful moans.  She had lost all sense of the her
surroundings, of direction, of the world.  Eruptions of bliss washed away
her sense, sending her soaring into the stratosphere of delight.  Her body
responded, shaking, quivering, hungry for more even as her orgasm tapered
away.  She jerked her head as much as she could, encouraging the tentacles
in her mouth to go deeper, to squirm into her throat and fill her belly
with their hot loads of bug juice.  She pushed down with her pelvis,
meeting the thrusting of bug cock.  She wanted it deeper, needed it deeper.
Those squirming rods had become her heaven, the drivers of her pleasure,
her desperate need.  More hot bug cum flooded her insides.  She felt like a
cauldron of semen being fed at both ends, and still it went on.  She
twisted like a leaf in the wind, swirling chaotically from climax to
climax. The tentacles never let up.  They raped her and raped her and
filled her twitching little 12-year-old body with buckets of cum, and
whenever one ejaculated there was always another to take its place.

   Her struggling turned to enthusiasm, her screams to exultant shrieks of
delight.  She welcomed each new batch of squirming tentacles that pushed
into her body, sucking hungrily, pussy trembling, asshole quivering
tightly. She had long ago let go of her senses of distance, of space or
direction.  She was somewhere.  The Chiropede's lair, maybe.  It didn't
matter.  Each climax blasted her again and again to the heights of
pleasure, obliterating her thoughts and replacing them with pure, unending
delight.  Days had passed.  Weeks, maybe.  Time stood still, flashing past
only in those brief moments between orgasms.  The clutching sensation of
the cavity was gone, replaced by the feeling of cool rock against her back.
Her body was coated head to toe in runny juices, a cocktail of saliva,
sweat, semen, and the slippery squirts of her own aroused fluids.  It was
rank.  It was delightful.  The sweet, wretched odor filled her nostrils as
she inhaled.  The air of the lair was wonderful.  The hardened sheets of
gooey webbing that shackled her was a prison of delight.  She opened her
mouth, and something filled it: a twitching, delicious bug cock.  One of
the juvenile Chiropedes.  It thrust rapidly into her mouth and quickly left
a revolting swill of bug semen in her throat that Seri swallowed eagerly.
The warm goop was salty nectar on her tongue and warm cream sliding down
her throat.  She licked her lips, savoring every drop, and then slipped
into a deep sleep of dreamy bliss.



   ~*~



   Seri no longer minded the silk webbing around her wrists and ankles that
kept her shackled to the rock.  It had been disorienting at first, being
affixed to the side of the stalagmite by the unbreakable white film, but
now she relished her position in the lair.

   She was not alone.  The other girls surrounded her on all sides, bound
by the webbing just as she was.  Their naked bodies were jammed haphazardly
together at different angles.  Alyssia was just above her, with the huge
paunch of her belly hanging down and her swelling genitals just inches from
Seri's mouth.  Selise was just across from her, spread-eagled with her back
against another stalagmite and arms and legs sealed tightly by webbing. 
Nelle and Nola were close on either side of her, their arms interlocked
with hers.  She loved them dearly, loved the cute little squeaking noises
the 8-year-olds made as the small Chiropedes clutching their bodies thrust
their twitching bug cocks into their little cunts.  They were like her
sisters now, and their pleasure was her pleasure.  They had both recently
given birth, and the Chiropedes were wasting no time filling up their
deflated bellies again with load after load of hot bug semen.

   There were others too - other girls, some who had already been here, and
more that had joined later.  The patron Chiropede returned from time to
time bearing loads of freshly raped little girls, naked and shrieking with
his cum dripping by the bucketload from their pussies.  More girls from
nearby villages and towns, Seri thought.  They had been deposited
chaotically in the empty spaces of the many stalagmites and been sealed up
tight like caterpillar larvae with their pussies exposed.  Once the
juvenile Chiropedes had them properly bound, they set about the joyful work
of inseminating them.

   The new girls had all quickly succumbed to the pleasure, of course,
embracing their roles as the breeding mothers of the lair.  Their cries of
pleasure and panting desire echoed in the stone chamber, an endless music
ringing out in this dark pit beneath the earth as the horde of Chiropedes
crawled everywhere on the sticky webbing, raping each girl in turn.  Seri's
eyes had adjusted to the darkness - a previously unknown Conversion effect.
She scanned the jutting pillars of rock that surrounded her on all sides,
seeing all the girls above and below her, each in varying stages of
pregnancy.  Her little family was just one of many.

   Nelle and Nola orgasmed at the same time next to Seri, both girls
shrieking with delight.  Their jerking motions against her arms stoked a
tingling itch of desire in Seri's pussy.  She could almost feel the hot
spurts of insect semen splashing up inside them like it was her own pussy -
a delicious flowing warmth, oozing ever deeper into their bellies, millions
of swimming bug sperm flooding their tiny wombs and seeking out their eggs.
They would be pregnant again very shortly, and their bellies would began to
swell again with little grubby Chiropede babies.

   Seri had long ago lost count of their broods.  The little ones matured
so rapidly, weaning off their mother's breastmilk in a matter of days. 
Their sexual maturity took less than a month, by which time they had grown
to the size of a large dog.  They weren't picky either - they loved to rape
their own mothers as eagerly as any other girl there.  Seri was sure at
last a few of her broods had come from her own sons.

   Just the thought of her own spawn clutching her heavy belly and
thrusting madly inside her until it unleashed its incestuous monster cum
sent her into a panting fervor.  The horniness was almost unbearable.  It
had been several minutes since she was last raped, and she needed relief.
The two Chiropedes on Nelle and Nola had slithered off after spending
themselves inside the little girls, leaving them to sleep.  Seri struggled
in her bonds.  The itch was growing unbearable.  She looked up.

   Alyssia was just above her, spread-eagled to the rock just like she was,
with Seri's head jammed right up against her cunt.  It usually afforded a
thrilling view of erect Chiropede cock slamming up into the girl whenever
she mated.  Seri loved the show.  She never tired of it.  Alyssia may have
spurned her before, long ago in a different life, but now they were sisters
again - bound together in their delightful service to the lair as tightly
as the webbing that held them immobilized.

   The passion in her loins had grown to a fever pitch.  Seri stretched her
neck and stuck out her tongue, running it along the juicy length of
Alyssia's cunt.  The salty flavor of the little girl tingled on her tongue.
Alyssia twitched above her, moaning, still half-asleep.  Seri took another
lick, ending with a flick against the tiny red bug of her clit, and Alyssia
jerked.  Her massive belly jiggled in the air.

   She was due.  Overdue, maybe.  Seri took in the stretched and swollen
look of the girl's cunt as she licked and sucked, tasting the juices of her
pregnant arousal.  Alyssia cried out wordlessly above her, basking in the
pleasure.  Seri felt how her own belly was stretched so taut it felt like
it might burst.  It would be a large brood.  She wondered if Alyssia or she
would give birth first.  She couldn't wait.  The young ones were a delight,
squirming around the naked bodies of their mothers like maggots until they
found the nipples and began to suck.  And after that, the non-stop
rapeathon until she was pregnant again was an earth-shattering experience.

   Alyssia shuddered and jerked as Seri licked.  She ran her tongue even
faster over the sensitive lips of Alyssia's labia, then rammed her tongue
between the lips.  Alyssia's muscles flexed tight as a long squeal came
from the girl's mouth, then she relaxed in exhaustion.

   Seri licked her lips, savoring her sister's juices - all salty and sweet
and alive with the oily undertaste of bug juices.  Delicious, like nectar.
Almost as good as the warm froth of bug semen on her tongue.

   A young Chiropede crept along a strand, coming straight for Seri.  Her
breathing grew heavy.  She had finally been noticed.  The muscles in her
pussy almost squirmed in anticipation.  The Chiropede was almost 5 feet
long and nearly of age - they left the lair not long after reaching sexual
maturity, heading out into the world to make their own lairs.  Seri wiggled
happily as it reached her and began to climb up her belly.  The hundreds of
little legs brushed her sides like the fingers of a lover as it climbed up
and positioned itself along her restrained body.  He looked fit and
healthy, as large as she was with several segments to his body already. 
They grew larger the more girls they raped, Seri knew.  He had been busy.
Such a good boy.  Seri was pretty sure he was one of her own, and at his
age he'd have a nice fat cock for mommy.

   Clutching her sides for leverage, the bug crawled up farther.  Its
bottom half curled up under her groin and it pressed the slimy underbellies
of its body against her face and pussy.  It would be a long time before he
was big enough to suck a girl entirely into the labia-like cavities
underneath each of his segments, but the bulging cocks that grew from each
of them were a very healthy size already.  Seri could see the erect flesh
jutting from the slippery pink hole just in front of her face.  The bulbous
tip touched the lips of her open mouth.  She opened her mouth and wiggled
her hips at the same time, encouraging him down below.  Tumescent flesh
grazed her pussy lips, sparking a delicious tingling thrill that shivered
her pussy.  She felt another visitor too: a pointed tip of flesh grazing
her back door.  The bug wanted all of her holes at once.  Such a good boy,
filling her up everywhere at once like that.

   The bug's body tightened and Seri jerked as three cocks penetrated her
at once.  The taut penises squirmed their way inside her slippery confines
and began thrusting.  Seri's body was rocked by the motion, the silken web
rustling as the bug began thrusting more rapidly, enjoying the feel of the
little girl.  Seri squealed but the sound was muffled by the turgid prick
moving in her mouth.  She sucked on it lovingly, relishing the syrupy,
insect taste.  She didn't know how but she was sure he was from one of her
own broods, now.  He tasted right.  He had squirmed his way out of his
mother's cunt as a tiny maggot and raped his way around the chamber, then
returned to fill the hole he had been birthed from with a flood of his own
cum.

   Seri moaned.  The thrusting bug cocks were driving the heat in her belly
like a bonfire.  Pushing into her mouth, sliding delightfully against her
quivering pussy walls, digging into the tight heat inside her asshole.  A
wash of pleasure raced in her body as it was rocked against the cool rock,
her son thrusting into her again and again.  He began to pick up speed. 
The tempo grew like a primal drumbeat, the turgid pricks slamming into
Seri's body.  Twitching cockmeat slammed into the tight tunnel of her
throat and crashed against her cervix.  She shuddered.  She screamed deep
inside with passion.  A electric pulse flashed up her spine and seized her
muscles as the pumping ecstasy erupted inside her and sent her soaring into
a wild orgasm.

   A torrent of hot goo splashed into her throat.  Seri swallowed madly. 
Another river splashed up inside her, her insect son unleashing his vile
semen into his mother's body.  Seri's muscles thrashed chaotically in a
storm of ecstasy.  A third flood of warmth emptied itself deep into her
bowls, sending Seri over the edge.  Flailing, buffeted by the storm of her
intense climax, she gave herself over to the pleasure.  This was what she
lived for.  This was what she existed for.  The thrusting, pumping cycle of
raw sexual pleasure that fueled her every waking moment.  Her hips jerked
on their own, welcoming her son's cum.  Her muted squeals thrummed in her
head until it was ringing.  The tsunami of her roaring climax crashed down
over her and obliterated all thought.

   She awoke a short time later.  The echoes of passion still rang out from
the stone walls, an endless chorus.  Her mate had vanished, leaving gooey
trickles of semen dripping from her nether regions and a sloppy mess of
bubbling saliva and bug cum running down her chin like grease.  She licked
her lips to savor the delicious taste.  Salty, with an aftertaste of greasy
insectile fluids, but to Seri it was as sweet as the birthday cake her
brother had made for her on her 8th birthday.  Funny.  She hadn't thought
of him in a long time.  The memories were hazy, distant.  Irrelevant.  How
odd it seemed, that she had once craved a simple farming life, that she had
welcomed her oldest brother as her closest lover.  The bugs were better
lovers than he had ever been.  Vaguely, she wondered what he would think if
he could see her now: a naked 12-year-old, bound, belly hot and tight with
grubs and globs of bug semen oozing from her genitals.  It didn't matter.
The memory of her brother faded away as quickly as it had come.  She
couldn't even remember his name.

   She had been such a naive little girl, never understanding her true
purpose.  She had trained so much, had fought so hard, despising her own
weakness every moment of her life.  And for what?  She saw it now: she had
never been made for that.  Her fate had always been here.  This was what
she had been made for, to mother her generations of children in this fowl
den of rock beneath the earth.  How many squirming grubs had she pushed
from her belly?  How many thousands of dripping little maggot-like insects
spawned from her womb?  Seri had never been happier.  The world had
rejected her, but she had found her place at last.

   Once, she thought her place had been as a mage, but she had never been
good at that.  Even her position at the library had been a concession. 
They had told her she was worthless and they had been right; she had no
worth in the human world.  Everyone that had depended on her had been
killed or captured, even the orphan girls that surrounded her.  It had been
so foolish for her to struggle.  She thought of her fallen mage sisters,
doubtlessly still cocooned in their proper places in the hive somewhere far
above them.  She wondered how she hadn't recognized their fate for what it
was.  It had all been spelled out for her in the tome, and she had been too
blind to see it - the doom of every little girl like her, following the
workings of fate set in motion long before she had even been born.

   The endless echoing screams of pleasure seemed to die down.  An odd kind
of stillness surrounded Seri.  She sniffed the cool air of the lair and its
familiar aroma of bug juices and body odor.  She couldn't sense anything
different, but something still seemed off.  She couldn't quite place it. 
She looked around curiously.  All of the girls - her family - were still
here, sleeping contentedly with their pregnant bellies drooping down.

   There was something...a presence.  Seri blinked her eyes as she looked
about.  Prickling flashes raced across her skin.  What was that?  Something
was coming from above - a light.  No, something in white, gleaming with an
inner glow that defied the pitch blackness of the pit.  What was it?  Seri
squinted her eyes against the painful glare.  All they had seen was
darkness for so long.  The light came down, a pure radiance like snow, and
finally dimmed enough that Seri could see.

   It was a woman.  Majestic beyond words.  Beautiful beyond description.
Seri gasped in shock.  She recognized the woman.  An entire page of the
forbidden tome had been dedicated to describing her: the woman in white,
the one who had corrupted the grand ritual and plunged the world into
chaos. Now, seeing her face again, all the pieces fell into place for Seri.

   It was Sheila.

   The very woman that had sponsored her duty at the academy, that had
taken her in as a personal assistant.  The book's magic must have kept Seri
from recognizing her.  Seri's mouth hung open as she stared.  Sheila glided
down as if on a carpet of air, her slippers alighting without a sound on
the muck of the lair floor.  She stood there a moment, smiling benevolently
at Seri, and Seri was struck yet again by the immaculate splendor of the
woman.  Her white dress was pristine, hugging her slender hips tightly
without a single fold out of place.  The beautiful top of white lace was
open at the shoulders, with delicately ruffled sleeves, and cut wide to
show a generous display of her perfect breasts.  Gems hung in a glittering
pageant of colors from the silver circlet on her head.  She looked like a
queen, a unmatched pinnacle of grace and refined majesty.  Seri hung her
head, averting her eyes in the face of that old, familiar feeling of
inadequacy.  There was something about Sheila that whispered of the
heavens, as though one might commit a blasphemy merely to meet the eyes of
a being so marvelous.

   Fingers cupped her chin lovingly.  The loose sleeve of Sheila's dress
swung in folds of silky lace as those fingers brought Seri's gaze up again.
Seri blinked, cringing before the authority of her old sponsor.

   "Seri." Sheila's voice was melodic, like the singing of birds.  "It is
so very good to see you again."

   "Sheila --" Seri croaked.  Her throat felt dry.  She suddenly felt very
insignificant.  She wished she could move so she could hide from the
beatific light coming from this woman.

   "You're looking happy.  How wonderful." Sheila's fingers cradled Seri's
face like a mother touching her child.

   "How...how are you --" Seri's voice rasped.  She felt unable to form the
words.

   "How am I here?" Sheila laughed - a rich, musical sound.  She took a
step back, taking in Seri with an approving gaze, seeing the sheetlike
webbing that kept her shackled, the belly bulging with pregnancy, the dried
fluids on her naked body and the globs of fresh bug semen dripping from her
cunt and asshole.

   "I think it's past time for you to be concerned with matters like that,
don't you?" Sheila's smile was condescending.  Seri winced.  She felt her
own filth keenly in the presence of this woman.  Despite her impeccable
kindness, Sheila had always had a way of making everyone around her feel
inferior.

   "Matters have moved quickly, Seri.  I'm very pleased." Sheila nodded to
herself, still smiling.  "I was content to let you keep it until I had need
of it.  That time has come."

   "It?" The word hung in the air, dull and flat.  Seri felt stupid.

   "Why, this of course." Sheila bent and touched the tiny sack resting on
the webbing below Seri's feet.  Seri had forgotten all about it.  Her
little pack of things had made the trip with her, then fallen off when the
last part of her uniform's skirt had finally disintegrated here.  It still
had everything in it.  Her supplies.  Her Monstrum Factorum.  The tome she
had stolen...from Sheila.

   Sheila plucked the sack from the silky strands and straightened up.  It
grew in her hands, responding to an unseen command.  Magic.  Magic without
a staff.  Sheila opened it and felt inside, then pulled out the stolen
tome.

   "I do so hate it when people steal from me," Sheila sighed, running her
fingers over the harsh lines of the book's cover.  "Really, you're quite
lucky Seri.  I wasn't so merciful to the last bitch that took something of
mine."

   Seri hung her head, ashamed.  Had she really stolen from this
magnificent woman?  It all seemed so long ago, in another life.

   "Funny, that you never even came to realize what you stole," Sheila
said, her smile taking on a fiendish edge.  "I let you steal it, of course.
It was too dangerous to keep where it was, and it was a good way to keep
tabs on you."

   Sheila ducked closer, fingers gasping Seri's chin again.  They felt
forceful this time, cruel.  Seri wished she could shrink into the rock as
she met Sheila's gaze.

   "You didn't really think you could have got this far on your own, did
you?  No, no my dear, sweet little cunt.  I knew you would end up here. 
The tome was with you the whole time, subtly directing your magic, your
choices.  The perfect chaperone, leading you right where you needed to go.
Just a sabotaged spell here, a little touch of power there.  A bump of
confidence right when you needed it.  Ah, Seri, my precious little slut. 
You never knew.  And once you got a nice big dose of monster cum inside
you, well, then it could do so much more with you."

   Seri stared, slack-jawed, her eyes still stinging from the light.  The
words made no sense to her.  She couldn't think.  A burning itch began in
her pussy, the relentless horniness that marked the cycle of her existence.

   "Hmmm --" Sheila's fingers gripped Seri's cheeks tightly as she forced
head to the left, then to the right, as if she was inspecting a bug caught
in a trap.  Her smile looked dangerous.  Had Seri ever thought the woman
was benevolent?  Had it all been an illusion?  The woman in white.  Seri
struggled to put the pieces together, to assemble her thoughts in order,
but they slipped away from her and vanished.

   "How amusing it all is," Sheila chuckled.  "You went about your pathetic
little life thinking your magic was your own, that it would always serve
you.  You have no idea, Seri.  But it's not your fault.  Your ignorance was
taught to you, handed down by all the pitiful meddling children that call
themselves Mages in this era." Sheila's laugh deepened to a wicked tone. 
"But matters are out of your hands.  You knew how this would end up, right?
How you and all your little mage friends would end up?"

   Seri nodded fearfully.

   "You've always known, haven't you?"

   Seri nodded again, beginning to pant.  The horny surge in her gut was
getting hotter.  She needed to be fucked, to be flooded with bug cum.  It
had been too long.

   Sheila nodded and took a step back.  Seri marvelled how the sticky
webbing and the filth of the lair seemed to refuse to touch the woman's
clothing.  A small Chiropede scuttled along a twist of webbing, coming up
alongside Sheila.  It waited, docile, and Sheila reached down a hand to pet
its hard carapace.

   "Hmmm.  Such lovely little creatures, aren't they Seri?  No strife, no
conflict of purpose.  Pure.  Whole, but for their need for girls like you."

   The Chiropede scuttled off on its own.  Sheila leaned closer to Seri,
putting her nose right in her face.  Seri would have looked away but she
was frozen in fear.  Why hadn't the bug attacked Sheila?

   Sheila's hand reached out.  Her fingers touched Seri's bare chest,
caressing the girl's smooth flesh.  She seized Seri's nipple and twisted
savagely, leaning in to crush Seri with a kiss at the same time.  Seri
shuddered.  The woman's lips were cold like the grave.  The beating pulse
in her cunt was raging now, desperate.  Something was happening.  A tight
pain was beginning deep inside her belly.

   Sheila pulled back, smiling sadistically.  Seri's saliva glistened on
her lips.

   "This is all a little cunt like you is good for anyway.  A perfect end
for a thief.  Yes, I think you'll be happy here." She rested her chin on
her hand, as if considering something.  Seri's heart skipped a beat under
that malevolent grin.

   "Happy.  Yes, you would be.  And we can't have that." She stepped
forward and pressed her palm to Seri's forehead.  A flash of lightning
flickered behind Seri's eyes.  Her head spun, suddenly dizzy.

   It wore off in moments.  Seri struggled feebly in her bonds, groaning
and incoherent.  She opened her eyes.

   She remembered it all.  Everything.  Her life as a little girl.  Her
time training as a mage.  Every failure and foolish choice that had led her
here.  Marcus.  The brother she had cherished and loved more than anything.
It was like a veil had been pulled back from her eyes.  Here she was, deep
in a dark hell of rock, sealed away, her body captive to the monsters that
had taken her.  A tool to be raped, to be bred, to bear endless nightmarish
spawn from her womb along with the girls that had trusted her to keep them
safe.

   She looked around, eyes widening in horror.  The woman was gone. 
Chiropedes crawled everywhere, raping the bounty of girls they had sewn
into the silken walls of their lair.  Hundreds of girls.  Pregnant. 
Breeders like her, birthing new monsters to terrorize the world.

   Seri almost choked when the first pangs of labor hit.  The tight mound
of her belly quivered and her pussy spasmed involuntarily.  She could feel
the swarm of Chiropedes crawling in her belly - dozens of them suddenly
moving, eager to come out, to be born.  Monsters hungry to feed.  To grow
large.  To rape more little girls like the ones cocooned here.  Like the
ones taken from Alura.  Like the four that had so foolishly followed her
down here.

   Like her.

   Her vagina spasmed painfully as it expelled the first of her new brood.
The twitching, maggot-like grub writhed on the silk just beneath her open
legs, slippery with the juices of her womb.
   Seri threw her head back and screamed.