Chapter 4: Worship at the Altar of Flesh
Time had dissolved into a thick, pulsing medium, measured only by the rhythmic clench of his body and the slow, distending growth of his belly. He hung, suspended, within the Leviathan's vast inner sanctum—the Maw was less a cavern now than a living, breathing cathedral of flesh.
Glossy, obsidian pillars of tissue rose and fell like lungs around him. Bioluminescent veins throbbed in the ceiling, casting an eerie, rhythmic glow. He was caught in a web of warm, prehensile ropes that were neither wholly tentacle nor umbilical cord. They snaked around his ankles, his wrists, coiling snugly under the pregnant swell of his stomach to support its aching weight. They tethered him ten feet above a tongue of slick, muscle tissue—the floor of the Maw, which shifted with peristaltic undulations.
Froggy’s monstrous, barbed cock was rooted deep inside him, a near-constant plug of ridged, hot flesh. It would withdraw with a wet, sliding pop only to pound back in, over and over, in slow, consuming cycles that had long since eroded the memory of any other sensation. He was permanently open, stretched wide around an inhuman girth, his pussy a used, slick channel that leaked a mixture of his own fluids and Froggy’s thick, milky spend. His stomach, once taut with muscle, was a tight, perfect dome, a silhouette that no human womb could hold.
The greatest indignity, the purest oblivion, lay between his legs. Two fleshy portals had opened at the juncture of his thighs, just below his oversensitive cunt. They were weeping, pink sphincters—the conduits the Leviathan itself used to explore and possess him.
From below, the floor-tongue would sometimes rise and lash at him, bathing him in a wash of saline warmth, tasting his exposed flesh. But the Leviathan’s true claim lived inside those new apertures.
Even now, as Froggy pulled its shaft almost all the way out before ramming home with a jolt that made Mark’s swollen tits bounce, the Leviathan’s ovipositors slid from the fleshy openings beneath. They were sinuous, whiplike appendages, slick and semi-translucent. They quested out lazily, stroking the outside of Froggy’s cock as it pistoned into him, rubbing his slick labia, draping over his straining belly with a horrific tenderness. They served no breeding purpose, not here. They were anchors, reminding him of a deeper, internal claim, binding him within this shared flesh.
A fat tentacle emerged from a crevice high on the cavern wall, its tip soaked in the same alchemical lubricant that eased every passage. It pressed against Mark's slack, pliant lips. He sucked it in without thought, letting it feed him a warm, sickly-sweet syrup that kept him alive and delirious. It was his only meal. His only communion. He gagged gently as it pushed to the back of his throat, drool threading down his chin to drip onto his chest. The psychic hum was a constant, low-grade sizzle in his blood, a chorus of slow cosmic approval: Acceptance. Belonging.Purpose.
He was a pet. A living shrine.
“Guh… m-more,” he slurred around the thick intrusion in his mouth. It wasn’t a plea, just a grunt of need. Even his voice belonged to them now—a strained, fucked-out rasp.
Froggy responded with a deep, guttural huff. The bony ridge at the base of its cock pressed against Mark’s stretched entrance, a familiar promise of the final, locking thrust. The rest of its alien weight was supported by its own appendages rooted into the flesh-walls. But Mark didn’t need the support of muscle or bone anymore. He needed the splitting stretch. He needed the brutal proof he was still being used.
When Froggy bottomed out, hilting itself fully, Mark arched in his organic bindings. A whimper leaked from around the tentacle in his mouth, punctuated by a sudden, hot gush of something wetter than seed from deep inside him. Clear fluid, smelling of ozone and copper, spilled from his cunt around the alien cock.
The two Leviathan’s ovipositors snapped tight around the base of Froggy’s shaft and his own labia, a sudden clench of possession. They pulsed. Something in his core—not his head, but a place just behind his navel, a place the thing had hollowed out and remade—viscerally vibrated. Sharp pins-and-needles shot up his spine and down his legs, triggering a weak, trembling orgasm that had nothing to do with his cock, which lay soft against his thigh, ignored. It was a uterine cramp of blinding, empty release. The glowing veins overhead flared in response, casting the entire cathedral in a surge of white-gold light.
“Mm-MAAH!” The sound strangled in his throat.
As the light faded and Mark sagged in his webbing, boneless and spent, Froggy began the slow pull back. Its ridged length dragged deliciously along his sore, sensitive walls. Mark clenched, trying to keep it in. The action was instinctive, mindless, and elicited a pleased rumble from the beast. The endless procession resumed.
The euphoria was paper-thin, fraying at the edges. Underneath the narcotic haze was a dull, metallic thought, a shard of the man he’d been.
Seven nights ago. Seven? That didn't matter. The important number was three. Three days ago, an escape pod, not one of the Iron Lung's, but some other colony ship, must have breached the blood ocean's crust. It hadn't signaled. It hadn't spoken. But they had found it. He hadn't seen them, hadn't gotten close. He'd only heard.
Through the psychic murk, he’d felt new sparks of terror.Human terror. Heard faint, distant screams. Screams he’d once mimicked.
And then, a sensation that still occasionally cut through the breeding fog like a shard of ice in his gut: a damp, full sound. A snuffling. It came from the elongated pupil of Froggy’s eye as it pressed inches from his own face later, its cock sheathed in him, still throbbing. Not for the new humans.
For him.
It communicated one clear, scouring image.
A pile of gore-spattered survival suits and crushed bone, guts weeping into a slick pool on the strange metal floor of the pod. Froggy had laid waste to them. Not just killed them. Rendered them not-him. It showed him, not to frighten him, he realized with a sick, lurching clarity. It showed him to reassure him. They were noise. He was purpose.
That’s what he had descended to. The preserve of compassion that had unintentionally spared Froggy on the Iron Lung—that long-ago moment when he could have abandoned a creature to die—had been perverted into the ultimate condition of his captivity. They kept him because he was soft, because he was kind, because he moaned into their tendrils with a broken need that mirrored their own awful curiosity. They had made his gentleness a fetish.
Below, the Leviathan’s floor-tongue extended upwards. It was broad and flat, muscle lined with sensing filaments. It pressed its warm, damp surface against his ass, his lower back, his swollen belly, cradling him. It began to lick, long, languorous strokes, cleaning the mixed fluids from his splayed body. The touch was not sexual. It was worshipful.
Mark closed his eyes. His mind retreated from the memory of the meat pile. It was easier."Mark."
The voice was not in the room. It wasn’t in his ear. It was a vibration from the Leviathan’s tongue itself, pressed against his navel. It was not a single voice, but a hundred overlapping whispers, something hacked and static-filled, ripped from a thousand old station recordings, coroner's logs, dying pleas, love letters... a patched-together mockery of human speech. The first time he’d heard his name called by this patchwork ghost, he had vomited over himself.
Now, a faint frown puckered his brow.
"Atonement," the layered whisper-hum caressed the word, turned it into a mollusk’s click and a sigh."Sufficient?"
Was it mockery? He didn’t know.
On another brutal, deep thrust from Froggy, he let out a sharp gasp. This time he tried to speak around the feeding tentacle. "Just.Fuck. Me," he gurgled, drool spilling down. "Don't… talk."
The tongue pressing to his belly curled at the edges, an approximation of a smile."What demand. My little priest," the voice whispered, the static crackle turning priest into a hiss that sounded like sacrifice. The word triggered another wave from deep in his remade womb, a feedback loop of pleasure and subjugation so intense he thought he might black out. The Maw’s walls throbbed in sympathetic purple light. The spiral wound ever inward. The next thrust triggered an orgasm so prolonged it felt like a minor seizure. This was his purpose.