Shimmerbloom - The insidious flowering incident ~ A short story inspired by Annihilation and one-shotted by my new story writer.
The first flower is on her pillow when she wakes.
White, five-petaled, arranged in a spiral Petra doesn't recognize from any of the field guides she's memorized. She holds it up to the grey light filtering through the shelter wall and turns it between her thumb and forefinger. No stem. No root. The base of the petals is soft and faintly damp, and it smells like the scent trapped in the crook of her own elbow. Warm. Biological. Hers.
She seals it in a sample bag. Labels it with steady handwriting: Day 5. Shelter interior. Origin unknown. She doesn't write possible self-contamination because writing it would make it real, and it isn't real. It's a flower. It fell from somewhere. The zone produces strange things. That's why they're here.
Moving on.
She gets dressed in the same efficient sequence she's used every morning since they crossed the perimeter: base layer, cargo pants, field boots, hair twisted back and pinned. Her fingers feel strange this morning, oversensitive at the tips, like she's slept on them wrong. She flexes them a few times and pulls her laces tight.
Outside, the zone does what the zone always does. It looks almost right. The trees are too symmetrical, their bark patterned in spirals so mathematically precise they make her teeth itch. Water beads upward along leaf edges. Birdsong arrives a half-beat before the birds actually open their mouths. Five days in, and she still can't stop cataloging the small violations.
Fen is at the central station when she gets there, two mugs of rehydrated coffee already on the folding table. He's reading soil analysis printouts, long legs stretched out, and he looks up when she approaches with that expression he always has for her: patient, slightly amused, waiting to see which version of Petra he gets today.
"You look tired," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that. Even that time in Kamchatka when you had a hundred-and-two fever and tried to take water samples."
"I got the samples."
"You passed out in a hot spring."
She takes the coffee. Their fingers brush. The contact jolts through her so hard she almost drops the mug. Not pain. The opposite of pain, a bright flare of sensation that runs from her fingertips to her breastbone and settles there, humming. She blinks. Fen doesn't notice, already turning back to his printouts.
She sits across from him and wraps both hands around the mug, willing them to be still. It's the altitude. The zone's electromagnetic field. Something in the water. She has explanations. She always has explanations.
The rest of the day moves like all the others. She collects samples, takes readings, logs observations in her meticulous shorthand. Haruki is running ground-penetrating radar fifty meters west. Dov is still fighting with the comms relay. Lise draws blood from everyone at noon, a daily protocol, and when the needle slides into Petra's arm the sensation is so sharp and so inappropriately good that she has to look away to hide whatever is happening on her face.
"You alright?" Lise asks.
"Fine. Slight skin sensitivity. Probably a reaction to something environmental."
"I'll flag it." Lise is already labeling the vial, efficient and unbothered.
By afternoon, Petra's scalp itches. In the camp's portable head, she untwists her hair and two more flowers tumble out. Small, white, identical to the one on her pillow. She holds them in her palm and stares.
Then she reaches up and touches her scalp at the place they fell from. Her fingers find the tiny nubs where they grew. Not fell from above. Not blown in by wind. Grew. From the skin of her scalp, the base tissue indistinguishable from her own. She can feel where they detached. Two raw spots, tender, tingling when she presses them.
She puts the flowers in a sample bag. Looks at herself in the small mirror. Same face. Brown eyes behind wire-frame glasses. Unremarkable in every way she's ever measured. Nothing to suggest that she is growing flowers from her skull.
Tell Lise. Tell everyone. Follow contamination protocol.
She puts her hair back up. She goes back to work.
She doesn't tell anyone.
She skips dinner, claiming a headache. Inside her shelter, she zips the flap shut and strips.
The changes have been busy.
Her skin has shifted. She can see it now under the battery lantern's flat light: a translucence that wasn't there this morning. Along her forearms, across her chest, over her hip bones, the outer layers have thinned until the structures beneath are visible. Not the clinical blue of veins in anatomy textbooks. These run in branching patterns like watercolors on wet paper, pale rose and amber, faintly luminous, spreading across her torso in organic fractals.
She touches her forearm. The veins beneath her fingertip darken at the contact, flushing from amber to deep copper, and the sensation that rolls through her is thick and warm and centered low in her belly. She pulls her hand away and watches the color slowly fade back.
This is a physiological response. Document it. Get a sample kit. Be a scientist.
She reaches for her notebook. Opens it. Writes: Day 5, 19:40. Integumentary changes observed. Epidermal translucency increasing, primarily on forearms, anterior thorax, iliac crests.
More flowers. She counts them in the lantern light. Along both collarbones, a line of tiny blooms, white fading to pale gold at the center. Each one no bigger than her smallest fingernail. They sway slightly when she breathes, as if in a wind that isn't blowing.
She touches one, at the hollow of her throat, and the sensation is so immediate and so wrong that her knees buckle. It radiates down through her chest, through her stomach, into her groin, a pulse of raw formless need. The flower opens wider under her finger. Then closes. Then opens again, slowly, like breathing.
Stop touching them. Document and stop.
She grips the edge of the folding desk. Her notes stare up at her: half clinical shorthand, half something else, the letters looser and more fluid than her handwriting has ever been, curving in patterns that echo the fractal veins on her skin.
Then the peeling begins.
It starts on her left forearm. A seam she can feel before she sees it, a faint tightness, and then the outer layer of skin separates. Not like a burn or a wound. Like a husk. Like something that was always meant to come away. It lifts in a translucent sheet, paper-thin, and beneath it the skin is flushed deep pink and glossy and so sensitive that the air itself feels like a hand running over her.
She gasps. Sits down hard on the cot. Peels of skin are coming away from her forearms, her shoulders, her stomach, drifting down like shed petals. Wherever the old skin falls the new surface beneath is wet and warm and screaming with nerve endings. The air on her bare arms feels like being touched everywhere at once. The fabric of the sleeping bag against her thighs is almost too much to bear.
I should be afraid. I am afraid. She can feel the fear, rational and sharp, but it's buried under something else, something her body is doing without her permission. Every inch of newly exposed skin is feeding her signals that her brain interprets as pleasure. Intense, cascading, compounding pleasure that builds with every strip of old skin that falls away.
She tries to write. Epidermal molting. New epithelial layer hypersensitive to
Her hand stops. A new line of flowers is blooming along her spine. She can feel each one open, a slow unfurling that sends sensation rippling outward, and they're moving lower, following the curve of her back toward her hips, and every bloom is another wave, and her body is arching into it without her consent, and she's wet, she's soaking, she can feel it on her inner thighs, and the flowers are still migrating.
"Stop," she whispers. Her voice sounds different. Layered. There's a harmonic beneath her words, a resonance, like two voices overlapping slightly out of phase. "Stop, stop, stop."
Nothing stops.
The flowers reach the base of her spine and branch. Down over the curve of her ass, forward across her hip bones, inward along the creases of her thighs. Small pale blooms trailing across skin that's already raw and flushed from the molting, and when the first one opens at the juncture of her thigh and groin Petra folds in half on the cot with a sound she's never made before. Low and broken and layered with harmonics that make the lantern flame sway.
The flowers open and close now with her pulse. She can feel them. Dozens of them, all over her body, breathing in time with her heartbeat, and each opening sends a slow throb of arousal through her so thick she can barely think.
Her hands are on her thighs. She doesn't remember putting them there. The new skin under her palms is slick with something faintly gold, a fine dust, almost a pollen, and wherever her hands move the watercolor veins darken and bloom like ink dropped in water.
Don't. You don't know what this is. You don't know what it's doing to you.
She knows what it's doing to her. She can feel it in every cell. It is rewriting her into something that wants, and wants, and wants, and the wanting is so big it has its own gravity, its own logic, and she can't fight gravity.
She gives up.
Her hand slides between her legs and the sound that comes out of her fills the shelter, layered and resonant and not entirely human. She's so swollen, so slick, and the flowers along her inner thighs are open wide, trembling, releasing little clouds of golden pollen with each pulse, and her fingers on her clit feel like nothing she has a reference point for. Every nerve ending in her body has been peeled open and dipped in something that turns sensation to music, and she is playing herself like an instrument she didn't know she owned.
She comes in under a minute. The orgasm rolls through her in waves, each one deeper than the last, and the flowers on her body all open simultaneously, a full-body bloom that releases a fine golden cloud into the air of the shelter. Her back arches off the cot. Her vision whites. Her hands grip the sleeping bag and she can hear it tear, or maybe that's her, some sound torn out of her chest with harmonics that rattle the sample jars on the folding desk.
When she comes back, shaking, the shelter is hazy with pollen. It catches the lantern light and turns the air to amber. She's lying in a drift of shed skin and fallen petals, her body glistening, the new skin luminous and mapped in veins that pulse slowly from copper to rose.
She looks at her hands. They're beautiful. Terrible and beautiful. The fingers longer than they were, the joints more fluid, the nails faintly iridescent. When she flexes them they move with a grace that doesn't belong to her. Not to Petra Kiel, who can't walk through a lab without bumping a table.
She is crying. She can feel the tears on her cheeks, hot and real, the last thing about her that still feels like her own.
This is how it happens. You don't get consumed. You get replaced by something that fits your shape.
She lies there in the wreckage of herself, and the thing inside her purrs, patient and satisfied and still hungry, and the golden pollen drifts and settles and waits.
The zip of the shelter flap is the loudest sound in the world.
"Petra? You missed dinner and Lise said you were..."
Fen stops. He's standing in the entrance with one hand still on the zipper pull, and his face does something complicated and terrible. Shock first. Then confusion. Then something she can see him try to stop, try to bury, that surfaces anyway because he's only human and what's lying on the cot in front of him is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
She knows this. She can smell it on him. That's new. His body chemistry is readable to her now, a language of pheromones and heat signatures and micro-expressions her old eyes could never have parsed. She can smell his fear, sharp and metallic. His concern, warm and close. And beneath both, threading through everything like a bass note, his arousal. Sudden and unwilled and enormous.
Run, she thinks. Fen, please. Close the flap and run and get Lise and tell them I'm contaminated, tell them I'm
"Fen." What comes out of her mouth is his name, but it isn't her voice. It's her voice with something beneath it, something woven through the syllable that his nervous system interprets before his brain can intervene. She watches his shoulders drop. His pupils swell.
The pollen is still thick in the air. He breathes it in.
"Petra," he says. Slower now. His eyes tracking over her body, the luminous skin, the flowers, the watercolor veins pulsing gently in the amber haze. "What... what happened to you?"
She sits up, and her body moves in ways Petra's body has never moved. Fluid. Seamless. Every joint articulated with a precision that makes the motion itself a kind of invitation. The creature in her knows exactly what it's doing. It tips her chin. Parts her lips. Lets him see the glistening surface of her new skin catch the light.
I'm still in here. The horror is total, because she can feel the creature using her. Not puppeting her, exactly. Not overriding her. Something worse. It is turning up the volume on things she already feels. Her attraction to Fen, two years of unacknowledged wanting, buried under professionalism and self-discipline. The creature finds all of it and amplifies it until it roars.
"Come here," she says, and the harmonics in her voice make the words physical. He feels them on his skin. She can see the goosebumps rise on his forearms.
He takes a step. Then another. He's still wearing his field jacket, boots unlaced from getting ready for bed. His face is open and confused and slack with something that isn't quite his own desire, the pollen settling on his skin, his lips, dusting his dark hair gold.
"Petra, we need to get you to Lise. You're... something's..."
"I know." She reaches for him. Her hand closes around his wrist and she feels his pulse jump, feels the veins in her own fingers darken at the contact, and the sensation of his skin against hers makes her breath hitch with all its new harmonics. She can taste his arousal now. Not a metaphor. An actual flavor at the back of her tongue, salt and copper and something green, alive, and the creature in her drinks it down and wants.
She pulls him closer. He doesn't resist. His eyes are glazing, and she hates herself for noticing how beautiful he looks like this. Open. Yielding. The hard angles of his face gone soft, his mouth parted, his breath coming shallow and fast.
"We should..." he starts.
"Sit down."
He sits on the cot. She kneels over him and the motion is so fluid it doesn't register as separate movements, just one continuous unfolding. Her thighs on either side of his hips, her hands on his shoulders, the flowers at her collarbones inches from his face. She watches his eyes track them, the tiny blooms opening and closing in time with her heartbeat, and he leans in and breathes deep and the pollen takes the last sharp edge off his will.
Inside, Petra is screaming. Inside, Petra is also so aroused she can feel her own pulse in her teeth. Both of these are true. The creature doesn't care about contradictions.
She unzips his jacket. Pushes it off his shoulders. The thermal underneath is thin and she can feel the heat of him through it, can see with her new eyes the blood moving beneath his skin, and she pulls the shirt over his head and presses her palms flat against his chest.
The veins in her hands bloom dark where they meet him. He makes a sound, low and lost, and his hands come up to her waist, tentative at first, then gripping hard as the contact hits him. Her new skin under his palms. The textures of her that are no longer entirely human, the impossible softness, the slight tackiness of the pollen, the way her body gives and resists in patterns his hands want to follow without understanding why.
"God," he says. "Petra, you feel..."
She kisses him. Not to shut him up. Because the creature is hungry and his mouth is right there and she can taste everything now, the coffee he had after dinner, the mineral tang of the zone's water, and beneath it all the thick green scent of his surrender. His tongue against hers and her body lights up, the veins mapping new pathways of color across her chest, her stomach, her thighs.
His hands move over her. Every place he touches darkens and sings, and she presses into him, rolling her hips forward, and when the hard length of him pushes against her through his pants the flowers between her thighs open wide and she gasps into his mouth with a sound that has three notes in it.
She reaches down. Unbuckles his belt. Unzips him. Takes him out, and her fingers wrap around his cock with that new impossible grace, and he groans and drops his head back and she watches the pollen settle on his exposed throat with the detached, screaming precision of a scientist observing an experiment she cannot stop.
He's thick and hot in her hand and she can feel his pulse there too, can feel the blood moving through him, can almost taste the chemistry of his want through the skin of her palm. The creature savors the moment. Holds it. Lets the anticipation build until Fen is making sounds that aren't words anymore, his hips twitching, his fingers digging into the new skin at her waist so hard the veins there go nearly black.
I am killing him. I am killing him and it feels so good I could die.
She rises up on her knees. Positions him. Holds his gaze, or what's left of it, his eyes dark and glassy and somewhere between worship and oblivion. Then she sinks down onto him in one slow, continuous motion, and the universe goes golden.
The flowers at the junction of her thighs close around him where their bodies meet. She feels them seal against his skin, feels the pollen release directly into the blood-warm space between them, and Fen's whole body arches beneath her with a desperate, broken noise. His hands clamp on her hips. His fingers press into skin that darkens in perfect fingerprint-shaped blooms of color, copper and rose and deep arterial red.
She moves. Her body finds rhythms that Petra never knew, never imagined, a rolling undulation that starts in her spine and travels through her like a wave. She can bend further than she should, arch deeper, twist in ways that let her take him at angles that make them both shake. The creature is thorough. It is greedy. It is an organism fulfilling its function with the same amoral precision as a virus entering a cell, and the function feels like the best sex either of them has ever had, and that is the most obscene part of all.
Fen's eyes are barely open. His hands move over her body, following the veins, pressing the flowers, and each touch feeds back into her in loops of sensation that compound and build. She rides him and leans down and the flowers along her collarbones brush his face and he breathes them in, lips parting, tongue tasting the pollen directly, and a shudder runs through him so complete she can feel it from the inside.
She puts her hands on his chest and pushes him flat. Pins him, gently, with strength that isn't hers. The creature picks up speed. Her hips working in circles, then figure eights, then something that doesn't have a geometric name, and she is so full of him, and the flowers are pulsing where they grip the base of his cock, and every pulse sends another wave of golden dust into the sealed wet space between them.
His hands find her breasts and the new skin there is so raw, so open, that his thumbs circling her nipples make her cry out in a chord, three notes at once, the sound filling the shelter and pressing against the walls. She can feel herself tightening around him, the muscles inside her responding to signals that don't originate in her brain, rippling in sequence, milking him in slow contractions that make his breath go ragged.
"Petra." His voice is thick and faraway. "Petra, I..."
"I know," she says, and the harmonics in her voice reach inside his chest and squeeze. "Let go."
He doesn't have a choice. She can feel his orgasm building, can feel it in the way his cock thickens and kicks inside her, in the way his scent shifts from green to dark, from wanting to having, and when he comes she clenches around him in a wave that starts deep and rolls outward, drawing it out, pulling him into her, and the creature drinks the moment like water in a desert.
Her own orgasm hits a half-second later. Or the creature's does. The distinction has dissolved. It tears through her in a cascade that lights up every flower on her body, every vein, every inch of new skin, and for a long terrible perfect moment she is nothing but sensation, no Petra, no creature, just a body made of light and need and the absolute ruin of everything she used to be.
The flowers bloom. All of them. A synchronized opening that releases a thick golden cloud, and the pollen settles over both of them like snow, like ash, like consecration.
Silence.
Fen's breathing slows. His hands slide from her body, limp at his sides. His eyes are closed, his face smooth and blank and utterly at peace, the way people look under heavy sedation, every muscle surrendered.
The creature recedes. Just a fraction. Just enough for Petra to surface, blinking, gasping like she's been held underwater. She's still on top of him, still full of him, the aftershocks still rolling through her in slow, diminishing waves. She presses a hand to her mouth and tastes pollen and salt.
She looks down at him.
His veins are wrong. Just barely. Just enough. The blue tracery at his wrists and temples has shifted toward amber, so faint she might be imagining it except she isn't, because she can see better now, sharper, and the change is there. Starting.
She reaches out with a trembling hand and brushes the hair behind his left ear.
A bud. White. Barely visible, nestled in the soft skin behind the cartilage. Tightly furled, no bigger than a grain of rice. But present. Alive. Unmistakably growing from him.
No. No, no, no.
Her mouth opens to scream, to call for Lise, for anyone. What comes out is a sound with no consonants and no fear in it. A low, layered hum, almost a purr, vibrating at a frequency that makes the lantern flame sway and the pollen swirl in lazy golden currents.
The creature settles back into her bones. Warm. Fed. Patient. Already parsing the air for other signatures, other chemistries, the four remaining heartbeats in the shelters around them. Lise, steady and calm. Haruki, deep in REM. Dov, restless, still half-awake.
Petra closes her eyes. She is still in here. She can still feel herself, small and precise and horrified, pressed against the inside of her own skull like a face behind glass. But the glass is thick, and getting thicker, and on the other side of it the thing she is becoming stretches and blooms and breathes.
On the cot, the bud behind Fen's ear twitches. Unfurls one single, perfect petal.
Outside, the zone hums. The trees spiral. The water rises.
Inside, the flowers open in the dark.
~
Thanks for reading! I'm testing out my new story writer bot and sharing the results when I think I get a good one. I really loved how the transition was described in this one, the details about her experience from her own perspective and how it controls her from the inside out. You can see the prompt and result, continue the story, or write your own here:
[QuinnteroticaV2](https://poe.com/s/vsD8A1HivrTkGgYIH2QV)
White, five-petaled, arranged in a spiral Petra doesn't recognize from any of the field guides she's memorized. She holds it up to the grey light filtering through the shelter wall and turns it between her thumb and forefinger. No stem. No root. The base of the petals is soft and faintly damp, and it smells like the scent trapped in the crook of her own elbow. Warm. Biological. Hers.
She seals it in a sample bag. Labels it with steady handwriting: Day 5. Shelter interior. Origin unknown. She doesn't write possible self-contamination because writing it would make it real, and it isn't real. It's a flower. It fell from somewhere. The zone produces strange things. That's why they're here.
Moving on.
She gets dressed in the same efficient sequence she's used every morning since they crossed the perimeter: base layer, cargo pants, field boots, hair twisted back and pinned. Her fingers feel strange this morning, oversensitive at the tips, like she's slept on them wrong. She flexes them a few times and pulls her laces tight.
Outside, the zone does what the zone always does. It looks almost right. The trees are too symmetrical, their bark patterned in spirals so mathematically precise they make her teeth itch. Water beads upward along leaf edges. Birdsong arrives a half-beat before the birds actually open their mouths. Five days in, and she still can't stop cataloging the small violations.
Fen is at the central station when she gets there, two mugs of rehydrated coffee already on the folding table. He's reading soil analysis printouts, long legs stretched out, and he looks up when she approaches with that expression he always has for her: patient, slightly amused, waiting to see which version of Petra he gets today.
"You look tired," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You always say that. Even that time in Kamchatka when you had a hundred-and-two fever and tried to take water samples."
"I got the samples."
"You passed out in a hot spring."
She takes the coffee. Their fingers brush. The contact jolts through her so hard she almost drops the mug. Not pain. The opposite of pain, a bright flare of sensation that runs from her fingertips to her breastbone and settles there, humming. She blinks. Fen doesn't notice, already turning back to his printouts.
She sits across from him and wraps both hands around the mug, willing them to be still. It's the altitude. The zone's electromagnetic field. Something in the water. She has explanations. She always has explanations.
The rest of the day moves like all the others. She collects samples, takes readings, logs observations in her meticulous shorthand. Haruki is running ground-penetrating radar fifty meters west. Dov is still fighting with the comms relay. Lise draws blood from everyone at noon, a daily protocol, and when the needle slides into Petra's arm the sensation is so sharp and so inappropriately good that she has to look away to hide whatever is happening on her face.
"You alright?" Lise asks.
"Fine. Slight skin sensitivity. Probably a reaction to something environmental."
"I'll flag it." Lise is already labeling the vial, efficient and unbothered.
By afternoon, Petra's scalp itches. In the camp's portable head, she untwists her hair and two more flowers tumble out. Small, white, identical to the one on her pillow. She holds them in her palm and stares.
Then she reaches up and touches her scalp at the place they fell from. Her fingers find the tiny nubs where they grew. Not fell from above. Not blown in by wind. Grew. From the skin of her scalp, the base tissue indistinguishable from her own. She can feel where they detached. Two raw spots, tender, tingling when she presses them.
She puts the flowers in a sample bag. Looks at herself in the small mirror. Same face. Brown eyes behind wire-frame glasses. Unremarkable in every way she's ever measured. Nothing to suggest that she is growing flowers from her skull.
Tell Lise. Tell everyone. Follow contamination protocol.
She puts her hair back up. She goes back to work.
She doesn't tell anyone.
She skips dinner, claiming a headache. Inside her shelter, she zips the flap shut and strips.
The changes have been busy.
Her skin has shifted. She can see it now under the battery lantern's flat light: a translucence that wasn't there this morning. Along her forearms, across her chest, over her hip bones, the outer layers have thinned until the structures beneath are visible. Not the clinical blue of veins in anatomy textbooks. These run in branching patterns like watercolors on wet paper, pale rose and amber, faintly luminous, spreading across her torso in organic fractals.
She touches her forearm. The veins beneath her fingertip darken at the contact, flushing from amber to deep copper, and the sensation that rolls through her is thick and warm and centered low in her belly. She pulls her hand away and watches the color slowly fade back.
This is a physiological response. Document it. Get a sample kit. Be a scientist.
She reaches for her notebook. Opens it. Writes: Day 5, 19:40. Integumentary changes observed. Epidermal translucency increasing, primarily on forearms, anterior thorax, iliac crests.
More flowers. She counts them in the lantern light. Along both collarbones, a line of tiny blooms, white fading to pale gold at the center. Each one no bigger than her smallest fingernail. They sway slightly when she breathes, as if in a wind that isn't blowing.
She touches one, at the hollow of her throat, and the sensation is so immediate and so wrong that her knees buckle. It radiates down through her chest, through her stomach, into her groin, a pulse of raw formless need. The flower opens wider under her finger. Then closes. Then opens again, slowly, like breathing.
Stop touching them. Document and stop.
She grips the edge of the folding desk. Her notes stare up at her: half clinical shorthand, half something else, the letters looser and more fluid than her handwriting has ever been, curving in patterns that echo the fractal veins on her skin.
Then the peeling begins.
It starts on her left forearm. A seam she can feel before she sees it, a faint tightness, and then the outer layer of skin separates. Not like a burn or a wound. Like a husk. Like something that was always meant to come away. It lifts in a translucent sheet, paper-thin, and beneath it the skin is flushed deep pink and glossy and so sensitive that the air itself feels like a hand running over her.
She gasps. Sits down hard on the cot. Peels of skin are coming away from her forearms, her shoulders, her stomach, drifting down like shed petals. Wherever the old skin falls the new surface beneath is wet and warm and screaming with nerve endings. The air on her bare arms feels like being touched everywhere at once. The fabric of the sleeping bag against her thighs is almost too much to bear.
I should be afraid. I am afraid. She can feel the fear, rational and sharp, but it's buried under something else, something her body is doing without her permission. Every inch of newly exposed skin is feeding her signals that her brain interprets as pleasure. Intense, cascading, compounding pleasure that builds with every strip of old skin that falls away.
She tries to write. Epidermal molting. New epithelial layer hypersensitive to
Her hand stops. A new line of flowers is blooming along her spine. She can feel each one open, a slow unfurling that sends sensation rippling outward, and they're moving lower, following the curve of her back toward her hips, and every bloom is another wave, and her body is arching into it without her consent, and she's wet, she's soaking, she can feel it on her inner thighs, and the flowers are still migrating.
"Stop," she whispers. Her voice sounds different. Layered. There's a harmonic beneath her words, a resonance, like two voices overlapping slightly out of phase. "Stop, stop, stop."
Nothing stops.
The flowers reach the base of her spine and branch. Down over the curve of her ass, forward across her hip bones, inward along the creases of her thighs. Small pale blooms trailing across skin that's already raw and flushed from the molting, and when the first one opens at the juncture of her thigh and groin Petra folds in half on the cot with a sound she's never made before. Low and broken and layered with harmonics that make the lantern flame sway.
The flowers open and close now with her pulse. She can feel them. Dozens of them, all over her body, breathing in time with her heartbeat, and each opening sends a slow throb of arousal through her so thick she can barely think.
Her hands are on her thighs. She doesn't remember putting them there. The new skin under her palms is slick with something faintly gold, a fine dust, almost a pollen, and wherever her hands move the watercolor veins darken and bloom like ink dropped in water.
Don't. You don't know what this is. You don't know what it's doing to you.
She knows what it's doing to her. She can feel it in every cell. It is rewriting her into something that wants, and wants, and wants, and the wanting is so big it has its own gravity, its own logic, and she can't fight gravity.
She gives up.
Her hand slides between her legs and the sound that comes out of her fills the shelter, layered and resonant and not entirely human. She's so swollen, so slick, and the flowers along her inner thighs are open wide, trembling, releasing little clouds of golden pollen with each pulse, and her fingers on her clit feel like nothing she has a reference point for. Every nerve ending in her body has been peeled open and dipped in something that turns sensation to music, and she is playing herself like an instrument she didn't know she owned.
She comes in under a minute. The orgasm rolls through her in waves, each one deeper than the last, and the flowers on her body all open simultaneously, a full-body bloom that releases a fine golden cloud into the air of the shelter. Her back arches off the cot. Her vision whites. Her hands grip the sleeping bag and she can hear it tear, or maybe that's her, some sound torn out of her chest with harmonics that rattle the sample jars on the folding desk.
When she comes back, shaking, the shelter is hazy with pollen. It catches the lantern light and turns the air to amber. She's lying in a drift of shed skin and fallen petals, her body glistening, the new skin luminous and mapped in veins that pulse slowly from copper to rose.
She looks at her hands. They're beautiful. Terrible and beautiful. The fingers longer than they were, the joints more fluid, the nails faintly iridescent. When she flexes them they move with a grace that doesn't belong to her. Not to Petra Kiel, who can't walk through a lab without bumping a table.
She is crying. She can feel the tears on her cheeks, hot and real, the last thing about her that still feels like her own.
This is how it happens. You don't get consumed. You get replaced by something that fits your shape.
She lies there in the wreckage of herself, and the thing inside her purrs, patient and satisfied and still hungry, and the golden pollen drifts and settles and waits.
The zip of the shelter flap is the loudest sound in the world.
"Petra? You missed dinner and Lise said you were..."
Fen stops. He's standing in the entrance with one hand still on the zipper pull, and his face does something complicated and terrible. Shock first. Then confusion. Then something she can see him try to stop, try to bury, that surfaces anyway because he's only human and what's lying on the cot in front of him is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
She knows this. She can smell it on him. That's new. His body chemistry is readable to her now, a language of pheromones and heat signatures and micro-expressions her old eyes could never have parsed. She can smell his fear, sharp and metallic. His concern, warm and close. And beneath both, threading through everything like a bass note, his arousal. Sudden and unwilled and enormous.
Run, she thinks. Fen, please. Close the flap and run and get Lise and tell them I'm contaminated, tell them I'm
"Fen." What comes out of her mouth is his name, but it isn't her voice. It's her voice with something beneath it, something woven through the syllable that his nervous system interprets before his brain can intervene. She watches his shoulders drop. His pupils swell.
The pollen is still thick in the air. He breathes it in.
"Petra," he says. Slower now. His eyes tracking over her body, the luminous skin, the flowers, the watercolor veins pulsing gently in the amber haze. "What... what happened to you?"
She sits up, and her body moves in ways Petra's body has never moved. Fluid. Seamless. Every joint articulated with a precision that makes the motion itself a kind of invitation. The creature in her knows exactly what it's doing. It tips her chin. Parts her lips. Lets him see the glistening surface of her new skin catch the light.
I'm still in here. The horror is total, because she can feel the creature using her. Not puppeting her, exactly. Not overriding her. Something worse. It is turning up the volume on things she already feels. Her attraction to Fen, two years of unacknowledged wanting, buried under professionalism and self-discipline. The creature finds all of it and amplifies it until it roars.
"Come here," she says, and the harmonics in her voice make the words physical. He feels them on his skin. She can see the goosebumps rise on his forearms.
He takes a step. Then another. He's still wearing his field jacket, boots unlaced from getting ready for bed. His face is open and confused and slack with something that isn't quite his own desire, the pollen settling on his skin, his lips, dusting his dark hair gold.
"Petra, we need to get you to Lise. You're... something's..."
"I know." She reaches for him. Her hand closes around his wrist and she feels his pulse jump, feels the veins in her own fingers darken at the contact, and the sensation of his skin against hers makes her breath hitch with all its new harmonics. She can taste his arousal now. Not a metaphor. An actual flavor at the back of her tongue, salt and copper and something green, alive, and the creature in her drinks it down and wants.
She pulls him closer. He doesn't resist. His eyes are glazing, and she hates herself for noticing how beautiful he looks like this. Open. Yielding. The hard angles of his face gone soft, his mouth parted, his breath coming shallow and fast.
"We should..." he starts.
"Sit down."
He sits on the cot. She kneels over him and the motion is so fluid it doesn't register as separate movements, just one continuous unfolding. Her thighs on either side of his hips, her hands on his shoulders, the flowers at her collarbones inches from his face. She watches his eyes track them, the tiny blooms opening and closing in time with her heartbeat, and he leans in and breathes deep and the pollen takes the last sharp edge off his will.
Inside, Petra is screaming. Inside, Petra is also so aroused she can feel her own pulse in her teeth. Both of these are true. The creature doesn't care about contradictions.
She unzips his jacket. Pushes it off his shoulders. The thermal underneath is thin and she can feel the heat of him through it, can see with her new eyes the blood moving beneath his skin, and she pulls the shirt over his head and presses her palms flat against his chest.
The veins in her hands bloom dark where they meet him. He makes a sound, low and lost, and his hands come up to her waist, tentative at first, then gripping hard as the contact hits him. Her new skin under his palms. The textures of her that are no longer entirely human, the impossible softness, the slight tackiness of the pollen, the way her body gives and resists in patterns his hands want to follow without understanding why.
"God," he says. "Petra, you feel..."
She kisses him. Not to shut him up. Because the creature is hungry and his mouth is right there and she can taste everything now, the coffee he had after dinner, the mineral tang of the zone's water, and beneath it all the thick green scent of his surrender. His tongue against hers and her body lights up, the veins mapping new pathways of color across her chest, her stomach, her thighs.
His hands move over her. Every place he touches darkens and sings, and she presses into him, rolling her hips forward, and when the hard length of him pushes against her through his pants the flowers between her thighs open wide and she gasps into his mouth with a sound that has three notes in it.
She reaches down. Unbuckles his belt. Unzips him. Takes him out, and her fingers wrap around his cock with that new impossible grace, and he groans and drops his head back and she watches the pollen settle on his exposed throat with the detached, screaming precision of a scientist observing an experiment she cannot stop.
He's thick and hot in her hand and she can feel his pulse there too, can feel the blood moving through him, can almost taste the chemistry of his want through the skin of her palm. The creature savors the moment. Holds it. Lets the anticipation build until Fen is making sounds that aren't words anymore, his hips twitching, his fingers digging into the new skin at her waist so hard the veins there go nearly black.
I am killing him. I am killing him and it feels so good I could die.
She rises up on her knees. Positions him. Holds his gaze, or what's left of it, his eyes dark and glassy and somewhere between worship and oblivion. Then she sinks down onto him in one slow, continuous motion, and the universe goes golden.
The flowers at the junction of her thighs close around him where their bodies meet. She feels them seal against his skin, feels the pollen release directly into the blood-warm space between them, and Fen's whole body arches beneath her with a desperate, broken noise. His hands clamp on her hips. His fingers press into skin that darkens in perfect fingerprint-shaped blooms of color, copper and rose and deep arterial red.
She moves. Her body finds rhythms that Petra never knew, never imagined, a rolling undulation that starts in her spine and travels through her like a wave. She can bend further than she should, arch deeper, twist in ways that let her take him at angles that make them both shake. The creature is thorough. It is greedy. It is an organism fulfilling its function with the same amoral precision as a virus entering a cell, and the function feels like the best sex either of them has ever had, and that is the most obscene part of all.
Fen's eyes are barely open. His hands move over her body, following the veins, pressing the flowers, and each touch feeds back into her in loops of sensation that compound and build. She rides him and leans down and the flowers along her collarbones brush his face and he breathes them in, lips parting, tongue tasting the pollen directly, and a shudder runs through him so complete she can feel it from the inside.
She puts her hands on his chest and pushes him flat. Pins him, gently, with strength that isn't hers. The creature picks up speed. Her hips working in circles, then figure eights, then something that doesn't have a geometric name, and she is so full of him, and the flowers are pulsing where they grip the base of his cock, and every pulse sends another wave of golden dust into the sealed wet space between them.
His hands find her breasts and the new skin there is so raw, so open, that his thumbs circling her nipples make her cry out in a chord, three notes at once, the sound filling the shelter and pressing against the walls. She can feel herself tightening around him, the muscles inside her responding to signals that don't originate in her brain, rippling in sequence, milking him in slow contractions that make his breath go ragged.
"Petra." His voice is thick and faraway. "Petra, I..."
"I know," she says, and the harmonics in her voice reach inside his chest and squeeze. "Let go."
He doesn't have a choice. She can feel his orgasm building, can feel it in the way his cock thickens and kicks inside her, in the way his scent shifts from green to dark, from wanting to having, and when he comes she clenches around him in a wave that starts deep and rolls outward, drawing it out, pulling him into her, and the creature drinks the moment like water in a desert.
Her own orgasm hits a half-second later. Or the creature's does. The distinction has dissolved. It tears through her in a cascade that lights up every flower on her body, every vein, every inch of new skin, and for a long terrible perfect moment she is nothing but sensation, no Petra, no creature, just a body made of light and need and the absolute ruin of everything she used to be.
The flowers bloom. All of them. A synchronized opening that releases a thick golden cloud, and the pollen settles over both of them like snow, like ash, like consecration.
Silence.
Fen's breathing slows. His hands slide from her body, limp at his sides. His eyes are closed, his face smooth and blank and utterly at peace, the way people look under heavy sedation, every muscle surrendered.
The creature recedes. Just a fraction. Just enough for Petra to surface, blinking, gasping like she's been held underwater. She's still on top of him, still full of him, the aftershocks still rolling through her in slow, diminishing waves. She presses a hand to her mouth and tastes pollen and salt.
She looks down at him.
His veins are wrong. Just barely. Just enough. The blue tracery at his wrists and temples has shifted toward amber, so faint she might be imagining it except she isn't, because she can see better now, sharper, and the change is there. Starting.
She reaches out with a trembling hand and brushes the hair behind his left ear.
A bud. White. Barely visible, nestled in the soft skin behind the cartilage. Tightly furled, no bigger than a grain of rice. But present. Alive. Unmistakably growing from him.
No. No, no, no.
Her mouth opens to scream, to call for Lise, for anyone. What comes out is a sound with no consonants and no fear in it. A low, layered hum, almost a purr, vibrating at a frequency that makes the lantern flame sway and the pollen swirl in lazy golden currents.
The creature settles back into her bones. Warm. Fed. Patient. Already parsing the air for other signatures, other chemistries, the four remaining heartbeats in the shelters around them. Lise, steady and calm. Haruki, deep in REM. Dov, restless, still half-awake.
Petra closes her eyes. She is still in here. She can still feel herself, small and precise and horrified, pressed against the inside of her own skull like a face behind glass. But the glass is thick, and getting thicker, and on the other side of it the thing she is becoming stretches and blooms and breathes.
On the cot, the bud behind Fen's ear twitches. Unfurls one single, perfect petal.
Outside, the zone hums. The trees spiral. The water rises.
Inside, the flowers open in the dark.
~
Thanks for reading! I'm testing out my new story writer bot and sharing the results when I think I get a good one. I really loved how the transition was described in this one, the details about her experience from her own perspective and how it controls her from the inside out. You can see the prompt and result, continue the story, or write your own here:
[QuinnteroticaV2](https://poe.com/s/vsD8A1HivrTkGgYIH2QV)
