Black is the New Red

The blackened putridity of my primordial swamp form didn't so much flow like a river across the barren wasteland. Instead, my formless mass of water, of hydrogen, ammonia and methane with lipids, sugars and amino acids crawled. It clawed at the rocks and gravel, slipping down between cracks and clinging to the edges.

Loose rocks and sand particles became part of me, eventually dissolving into me. While grass and leaves were consumed as vegetation, I journeyed for a long time before I came across something approaching living, intelligent life. A four-stalked vertical beast of an obnoxious size. As it stood there before me, I slithered beneath it. I gripped its long, thick appendages and secured it as I spread myself, coating the creature until I could feel every flinch and shift in weight as it tried to escape. Its heart quickened as I penetrated into its multiple entry points—at the back, at the front, and hanging down its underbelly. I felt its lungs struggle as my thick slime coated its frontal entry point. There was a delicious warmth that soothed my weary body as I choked the life out of it and drained its body of nutrients and vital components.

It had been a long time, I think, since I had enveloped a living thing in the dark embrace of my congealed veil. It had been longer than I dared to consider since I had what one might consider a fulfilling meal. Until now. It took me longer than expected to digest it all from its skin and external features inward, down to bone.

I could feel my body develop after my feeding. To the front of my mass, two stalk-like lengths pushed down into the ground and steadied their position, and instinctively my black sludge-like form shuffled forward, propelled by them.

A slim, tapered length on each side connected to a round bump that hinged before thickening outward and forming an arch between the two stalks.

Movement became purposeful, ordered and swift, as I groped and encased smaller creatures that slithered, ran or maybe even leaped. They all succumbed to the claustrophobic chokehold of my embrace, as oxygen was replaced with freshly sprouted tendrils into the tiniest and largest orifices. Elation and ecstasy could be said of the experience as I drained their life force, then their basal chemical and biological makeup to enrich my expanding, maturing mass.

Then.

"What the hell is this gunk?"

A flame-haired biped with a dull but pristine pale exterior and a canopy of an extra layer of synthetic skin. She stands on the edge of my wasteland.

"Alfred, the bastard. Where is he when I need his services?"

It's only after a few moments that she lifts her leg and I feel myself being stretched. As her dress flaps in the gentle breeze, I get a full glimpse of a potential entry point. Light hairs coat it and it looks like there's a line I can breach by gently sliding between two sections of flesh.

It is always dangerous approaching a lesser-known prey, even for something as ancient as me. Still, a stalk, or leg as she insists on calling it, is a stalk, and I push my coagulated form over the digits poking forward from her stalk, allowing my viscous form to welcome her into my embrace.

Her body reacts as they all do: a shift of weight from the digits to the back rounded section of her stalk end. Cautiously, compared to the other creature, I take a different approach, using my highly sensitive nerve endings to feel out her micro-reactions. Low resistance so far, as I feel her vibrate to my touch.

"What the fuck?"

As I relax and let my instinctive persistence overwhelm the soft and delightfully warm texture of her body, I feel a sudden sharp incision and feel a violent separation as I cling to her, as the rest of my body shrinks back towards the vast wasteland.

"Maybe I can coax Alfred over to mine with some sexy pics of my foot covered in this weird black shit that looks like liquid latex. I'm not fully against it."

I don't know how she cut it away, but as I am left clinging to her stalk—as much out of uncertainty as part of my long game to own her—the rest of my body lies yonder. Still, she seemed intent on sharing with Alfred whatever she thought I was. Alfred must be her main mating partner. Humans are so primitive.

The digits on the long flesh stems from her upper body penetrated into my mass and I... felt her. A cold rectangle pressed against my surface and an illuminatory flash momentarily lit my surface up. Even I was enchanted by the interplay and contrast of her pale exterior so close to my dark and imposing tone.

Sentient beings are said to be classified in terms of their level of perception and individual thought beyond basal species instincts. This Sally seemed to be teeming with a tantalizing mixture of ferality and intellectualism. The perfect host for my ascension. I just had to bide my time and hope that fascination did not lead to boredom or irritation and... I don't even want to think about it.

My fast-track processing of her makeup suggests these bipeds require calm and consistent bed rest. That may be the time to make my attack. If she ever sleeps.

By my assessment, crude and quick as it is, there are a number of entry points. Though the main one is between her legs, the one I caught a glimpse of unprotected, which emanated a sweet and pleasant scent, and another at the opposite end are ideal for ensuring I can take full control of Sally. There are also smaller but crucial entry points to the north and west and east of the one which she uses to emit sounds known as speech.

As human beings—that's what they are called—are far more complicated than what I decomposed and ingested earlier, which was a cow, I still need to slither and slip with great caution. As she walks through a series of streets and returns to what she calls her palace of practiced-to-perfection solitude, I feel my time is approaching. She keeps caressing my clumping, clawing mass with little of the fear and anxiety the cow displayed. But, I trust in the process of my ancestral swamps and the lessons they taught. It may just be a clever ruse so that she appears less weak than she is in some kind of double bluff. She plays double bluffs on Alfred and other males she entraps.

I start to siphon off smaller, tiny fragments and send them northwards. As one makes its way up the stalks known as legs, it reaches the knee as she opens the door and, with one flick of her digit known as a thumb, removes it and smears it onto her neck.

I fear for mankind if Sally is an example of these apparently tyrannical and violent human bipeds. This feels easier than I thought as we enter her den, her nest, and the heat feels suffocating as I struggle to adjust the number of airholes across my greatly shrunk body. As my neck fragment, now independent of me, moves northwards, Sally removes her red, thin extra skin she refers to as a dress and sits down on a sofa stained with blood. It's also red.

Sleep surely will come soon as she sits lost in her own world of thoughts. Her eyes close and she relaxes as I gently, cautiously stretch my body a little to coat her ankle and calf on her right leg. Simple sighing and murmuring and a lot of violent, or something similar, thoughts about this Alfred. As I slowly caress and coat her pale skin, my black, all-encompassing form takes hold and she seems to relax. Her breathing dials down to a gentle, pulse-like speed while her breathing calms.

I can feel the warmth increasing as my limited form is elasticated and able to stretch ten times its normal size. I embrace her knee and then slowly make my way up her thigh, as the fragment on her neck slowly presses up her cliff-like chin and towards her mouth. I feel her naked form shift under my touch and my decomposing veil and figure my time has come—until the fragment on her mouth coats her lips and she licks at me with something humans call glee, myself coating her tongue and guiding me inside her mouth.

As the rest of me slurps and slips up her thigh towards the target entry point, her body seems to bloom and I feel an even stronger scent emanating from the opening between her legs. As strange as it is, and a little unnerving, her movements make it easier, and as the fragment on her mouth separated into smaller pieces, I find a pathway to her brain and other important system controls deep within.

She quivers and laughs as she thinks of how she is going to torment Alfred. As my ancient consciousness floods her mind with visions and echoes, neural feedback in her left ventral temporal cortex by manipulating her fusiform imagery node, to show her all those thousands of centuries I spent in a barren, howling void that offered me no comfort and I craved the pressure, the inconvenience and lost space of another against me, I feel her body respond with hip rolls, as her human brain shrugs it off. Feeling like an uninvited spectre at a drab and conservative cheese-and-wine night where no keys are exchanged or placed in a potluck bowl, I quiver and shiver at just how entirely unimpressed she is by the scale of oblivion I have endured. Then I feel the interruption of my attempted mind meld via a sharp point—a digit pressing into her thigh, penetrating through my mass and almost breaking her skin—and then she carries me upwards towards her opening and smears me against the lightly furred skin and forcibly pushes me deeper inside.

Finally, the fragments in her mouth that separated have commandeered her ears and have entered her brain. Sound is momentarily blocked out and she fights against her inability to breathe, but maintains her cool. Her hands glide over her skin as she scratches her chest and belly, but not out of desperation. Her legs close and I feel her internal muscles clench and hold me in place as her natural lubrication merges and dilutes my own exteriority. Reading her brain is a scientific research project in itself as I feel her urging me to take form, to replicate her memories of Alfred.

I try to overwhelm her ears and nose as fragments coat and stretch and rejoin, covering her in our veil of decomposition and digestion, but her brain fights back. So many of her thoughts are that of a dissonant, disenfranchised individual who makes a lack of passion her passion.

"Fuck me," comes a measured command dressed up as a breathy plea from her blackened mouth as it flexes and thrusts me deeper inside her.

Feeling a lack of control over my own mass, despite stretching over her body and trying to suffocate my prey, she seems to wield mastery over me and my goal of overwhelming all access points is working in her favour. My mind... is diluted with thoughts no longer of domination and control but pleasure—hers, as she grips me and pulls my edges from inside her, coating her underbelly, her breasts and her ass with my body.

So much indifference, so much Sally. Poisoning or curing me. Cursing me or granting me freedom from my hunger.

"Black is the new red," she murmurs as her body tenses. "Alfred is in for a real treat later, but first my new toy needs a proper road test."

And that's when I feel the claustrophobia and the need to please her, as I feel my body move in and out of her openings. I can't stop until she tells me or shows me she's finished. As a creature, a formless mass of gases and nutrients, I craved to feast on her, to overwhelm and assimilate her, but as I am thrust into her vagina, her ass and her mouth, I am lost.

All I can see is all I can feel is all my purpose is for Sally who is Sally... as I feel my mass contouring to fit inside her entry points and my skin becomes hers and as she stands looking in the mirror caressing me, caressing us, with a dissonant smirk cracking across her face, I wonder what will become of me. Every time I try to leave, her mind and body pull me back inside her deepest points and hold me prisoner.

*

Thanks for reading!

So this is for Steal From Yourself. It took me a while to decide what I was going to do, but then when I thought back to one of my favourite characters I wrote as part of a mini character study (loosely inspired by the James Joyce story Eveline from Dubliners) I knew I had to give Sally, the most red girl, a bigger spotlight. So I took her and put her into a cosmicish body horror romp. I wanted to answer what happens when the deeply disenfranchised and indifferent woman who doesn't scare easily and doesn't give much of a shit about anything meets a primordial swamp being intent on taking over the world or something.

Although I am sure the story stands on its own, please check out

Sally's first story, Sally Was Sally, to see why it had to be Sally I stole.