Chapter 25: Corrupted Pollination
The silence after killing the scout was worse than before. It felt judged. Watched. Every skeletal tree seemed to have shifted just slightly when I wasn't looking, tilting their bare branches to follow my progress. The drip of my nectar was the only living sound, a soft, rhythmic tap on the dead needles underfoot.
I was a raw nerve. The memory of that cold, sucking mouth on my breast was a brand on my mind. My skin felt too tight, the golden threads under it buzzing with a distressed, warning hum. The wolf inside me paced, restless and angry.
I reached a small clearing, a bowl of gray earth where nothing grew. In the center stood a single, massive pine, wider than my old cabin. It wasn’t just dead; it was wrong. Its trunk was split open from root to crown, the fissure weeping that same iridescent black fluid, but thicker, like molten tar. The air here tasted of ozone and spoiling honey.
I should have turned back. I knew it in the part of me that was still just Amy, the woman who liked quiet and solitude. But the other part, the part that was now woven with threads of the Grove and the ghost of a wolf, took a step forward. Then another.
The tree moved.
It wasn’t an uprooting. It was a contraction, a flexing of ancient wood. From the weeping fissure, from the gnarled knots on its trunk, from the very earth at its roots, things emerged. Not creatures. Tendrils. Thick as my arm, slick with black fluid, they pulsed with a vile, internal light. They were the color of bruised flesh and rotten heartwood, and their ends tapered into swollen, bulbous tips, veined with glowing green.
They slid across the ground with a sound like sand over leather. Fast. Purposeful.
My body reacted before my mind could. I turned to run, but two tendrils lashed out, wrapping around my ankles with terrifying strength. They yanked my feet out from under me. I hit the ground hard, the impact driving the air from my lungs in a pained gasp. Before I could inhale, another tendril coiled around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides. It squeezed, lifting me off the ground until I was suspended before the monstrous tree, dangling like fruit.
I struggled, thrashing, a scream building in my throat. The tendril around my chest tightened, forcing a choked sound from me instead. The linen wrap tore away completely. My breasts hung free, heavy and full, nectar streaming down my abdomen in golden rivulets.
The tree seemed to drink in the sight. The pulsating glow in the tendrils quickened.
Another tendril, thinner but impossibly strong, snaked up my leg. It pushed roughly against the rough fabric of my trousers. I clenched my thighs, a futile, instinctive defense. The tendril didn't pause. It pressed, and with a sickening tear, the fabric split open from waist to knee. The cold, dead air hit my bare skin.
“No,” I finally managed, a raw scrape of a word. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”
It wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a thing that could listen. It was hunger and corruption, a blind need to infiltrate, to pollute the source of the sweet, hurting light that opposed it.
The thinner tendril probed at my cunt. I jerked in my bindings, trying to twist away. The touch was abominable—not cold like the scout, but a feverish, unnatural heat that felt invasive instantly. It pushed against my opening, a blunt, insistent pressure.
I was dry with terror. It didn’t care. It pushed harder, a relentless, mechanical force. The bulbous tip, slick with its own oily secretion, forced its way inside me.
I screamed then. A full-throated, ragged sound that tore through the silent pines. The violation was exquisite, a burning, stretching agony as the thing penetrated me. It was too big, shaped all wrong, and it didn’t stop. It pushed deeper, past muscles that clenched and tore, past any boundary I had.
It fucked into me with a slow, deliberate rhythm, each inward thrust a seismic shock. I could feel every vein, every ridge of its grotesque surface as it pistoned in and out. The burning heat spread through my core, a poison that sought to dilute my essence. My nectar flowed faster, a golden torrent that sprayed with each violent jolt of my body.
The tree responded. More tendrils descended. One wrapped around a breast, squeezing hard, making me cry out again as a jet of nectar spurted from my nipple. Another found my mouth, prying my jaws apart despite my gritted teeth, forcing its way over my tongue. It flooded my throat with the taste of bitter alum and rotting flowers, a viscous fluid that burned as I gagged and swallowed reflexively.
But the worst was yet to come.
From the main fissure in the trunk, a new tendril emerged. This one was thicker than the others, a monstrous, primordial thing. It was covered in whorls and knots that mimicked the texture of bark, and its head was a swollen, dripping obscenity. It moved with a dreadful, sure purpose towards my lower body, towards where the first tendril was still ruthlessly pumping in and out of my ravaged cunt.
It didn't replace the first. It pushed against the same stretched, burning opening, vying for space. For a second, the resistance was absolute, a wall of pain so profound I saw only white light. Then, with a wet, tearing sound that I felt in my soul, it forced its way in alongside the other.
The fullness was beyond comprehension. It was a splitting, a sundering. I was packed with them, stuffed full of pulsing, corrupted wood. They began to move in a hideous, alternating rhythm. One withdrew as the other plunged in, a continuous, brutal fucking that robbed me of any thought, any identity beyond the sensation of being ripped open.
They went deeper than anything ever had. Past the final, sacred gate. A searing, invasive pressure bloomed deep in my belly as one of them breached my cervix, forcing its way into my womb. The pain was clean and sharp, a lightning bolt of absolute violation. Then the other followed, stretching the internal wound wider.
They weren't just fucking me. They were planting.
I felt a hot, thick fluid begin to pump from their tips, flooding my deepest channels. It wasn't sap. It was the blight itself, a seething, corrupting essence that burned as it filled me. My back arched against the tendril that bound me, a silent scream locked in my throat, blocked by the thing fucking my mouth. My vision frayed at the edges, tunneling into a pinprick of agony.
Inside, a war raged. The invading black corruption met the radiant, golden nectar that was being churned from my breasts by the violent motion. Light and dark clashed in the core of me. I could feel it, a chemical, screaming reaction in my veins, in my torn tissues. My nectar sizzled against the tendrils inside me, making them jerk and shudder, but they only pumped harder, faster, driven by a mindless imperative to overwhelm.
The pleasure came then, unwanted, horrific. It sparked from the overstimulated nerves, a brutal parody of climax that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with system overload. My body convulsed, bucking against its bindings as a crushing, shameful wave of sensation detonated from my ravaged cunt out to my fingertips. I came on the violating tendrils, a sharp, agonizing spasm that mixed with the endless flood of their corruption.
It broke something in me. The last of Amy, the woman who built a cabin to be alone, shattered.
The wolf surged forward, but it wasn't the clean, predatory fury from before. It was matted with this violation, maddened by it. The glowing threads under my skin didn't just hum; they screamed, a silent, luminous shriek of outrage.
With a crackle of energy I felt in my teeth, the golden light erupted from my skin. Not in threads, but in a wave.
It blasted out from me in a silent, radiant ring. Where it touched the tendrils, they blackened, crisped, and turned to ash. The ones inside me dissolved into fetid smoke, evacuated from my body in a sudden, painful void. The bindings around my chest, ankles, and mouth vanished into nothing.
I fell to the ground, a heap of trembling, filthy flesh. Fluid—golden and black and red— leaked from between my legs. The massive tree shuddered, its fissure weeping faster, but it was scorched and silent, the malevolent intelligence behind the attack momentarily stunned.
I pushed myself onto my hands and knees, vomiting a black, oily substance onto the gray earth. My body felt hollowed out, a used-up vessel. But the war inside wasn't over. I could feel the blight's seed, a cold, coagulating knot deep in my womb, fighting the radiant heat of my own essence.
I wasn't pregnant. But I was infected.
I crawled, then staggered to my feet. My clothes were in tatters. I left them. Naked, dripping with the evidence of the battle, I turned away from the great tree. The wolf-instinct was no longer a separate thing. It was the only engine left driving my broken shell. It had one directive, born from the violation: find the heart. Find the source of the corruption.
And burn it out of the world.
My bare feet left prints in the gray dust—a mix of golden nectar and iridescent black. I moved north, not with stealth, but with a terrible, lurching purpose. The blight had tried to make me a vessel. It had instead made me a bomb.