It was inverse.

Lillie found it difficult to breathe. The air stuck like she had tonsillitis, painful and thick. Too gooey to inhale, too slick in her throat.

Breathing was, surprisingly, actually one of her biggest problems right now. Immediately after she'd been pulled through, Nihilego had let go and the tendril in question had slipped away - Lillie moved in the opposite direction. She could wait where it left her in the hope that her mother or Sun would reopen the portal, but that seemed like a very bad idea, if Nihilego was to return in force.

There was still venom in her system, pounding like a sledgehammer against her skull - not stopping there, it was also taking the broken pieces of skull it created and then nailing them into her head to boot. It felt like her mind was collapsing and her hands scrabbled at her temples in erratic and twisted ways to try and exorcise the alien fluids that girdled her.

There were sounds like spindly wind chimes as shards tinked against one another in the distance. Lillie had to pray she wouldn't run into one, the incoherent high of taking the venom now replaced with an altogether more understandable survival instinct. It still had an effect on her but couldn't control her directly. This place was not a place that she knew. Not a place she could stay.

The horror of what she'd done hit her like a freight train, scattering her mentality to the four winds. She'd raped Sun. She'd threatened to kill Sun, and thankfully hadn't done any more than hurt him. There was still the pull of the parasite in her body, dragging her back toward Nihilego, wanting to be with it, wanting to show it she was still dedicated, but she wasn't. She wasn't Nihilego's host.

Lillie knew what she was: She was lost, alone, naked and afraid in a hellscape of what was oppositional to that which she knew, among small noises and creeping creatures that sought to take her as their own.

And there was a light in the distance, a cool red light that shone through the sharp growths and spires of gleaming minerals.

Lillie thought she might find... something there, and headed toward it, cautiously, silently. Hoping against hope that maybe, just maybe, that red light was a beacon into somewhere better.

Staggering through the twisted landscape she found a constant thrum beneath it all. The place she was in had a slow, steady pulse of its own. Very slow paced. Very... very soothing. Her own heart rate was slowing. She was seeing the place more and more as home. High above there was a vaulted stone roof through holes in which a black sun shone. It hurt to look at, but wasn't bright.

Lillie was in some kind of cave in Ultra Space then. Or... there was a... a sheen, a mist that swung back and forth above. She was underwater. The rise and fall of those tides above were what she'd interpreted as a heartbeat. This was Ultra Space's closest equivalent to the ocean. With that thought she became even more helpless.

If there were any citizens of Ultra Space that could help her, that knew morality and weren't simply mindless monsters, she was out of reach of them, in a sea she could breathe, in a chasm she couldn't swim out of.

Bottomless pit. Devouring maw. Inescapable jaw. Forever swallowed.

Ugly thoughts that she deserved to be here found voice in her subconscious. 'I hurt Sun. I swore I'd never be like... be like mother... and...'

In a place like this, morale was everything. And hers was slipping and sliding and skidding off the rails, justifiably so. Lillie had betrayed herself under Nihilego's control.

But the light was hope. It was potential. What if others were lost here? She thought about her current state and became more self aware of her nakedness. If there were others... they'd understand.'They won't... won't hurt me. We'll- we'll all be stuck together, so... maybe it'll be okay.' She was vulnerable, and that vulnerable nature was highlighted by Nihilego's method of attack - needles, injections, syringes of venom, bare skin only making that instinctual fear stronger.

She froze, hand on one of those odd gemstone trees as she saw the source of the light. It was a Nihilego, maybe hers, channeling the light striking off of one of the ruby chunks in a nearby rock stack. Lillie knew why it was doing that. It was like a Lanturn, trying to draw her in with pretty light now that she knew it's nefarious nature. Yet, even though she knew... Nihilego had always beenow... a force for good. A beautiful thing. It only wanted to help, she'd abused its power oh.

OH

OH MY

FUCKING

MY MY MY MY MY MY

M I N D

M I N E

Lillie, while focusing on Nihilego, hadn't seen the tendril that was separate from the main body. She'd been too scared of the main body to think that pieces could act individually. A length of about twenty inches had hidden on the rock stack she'd paused beside. Slithered along her arm like a jolt of electricity, and jabbed into her spine, hijacked her very nervous system, aligning itself with her spinal column and interfacing with her nerves, an accuracy gained through millennia of immortal existence preventing Lillie from feeling any pain as the takeover happened.

Then-

Buried
Needles sharps dispose into
Veins burst with black liquid
SUPERNOVA BLAST A-PART (OF) YOU(')R(E) MIN(D)/(E)

Autopilot mode was switched on it had complete control there was no way to resist because it was her and she was it and she had no thoughts of her own and Nihilego had no thoughts of its own her head was void and empty lillie was that a name or a thing or a who or a what or a where? Directive: rejoin with the core reconnect to the rest create a cocoon and then it was going to
E A T
Y O U
T A K E
WHATEVER
I
W A N T
F R O M
Y O U
LILLIE

Lips hung loosely. Black had ran down them, running all the way away, where the host could only envy it. Nihilego formed a throne, a throne that bloomed, slithered, bound and writhed, medusan.

The back of her skull had been peeled open and a crystalline flower comprised of many individual shards bloomed within, attached to a white vine of similar form that pulsated malevolently. A slow mockery of a heartbeat. The host could hear it. Swelling, then shrinking. Swelling, then shrinking. Pumping something, something horrific and numbing, into the host's head.

There were more crystals growing around her. The throne was expanding outward, growing like a plant. There were long, cold tendrils squeezing the host's thighs, the hold becoming uncomfortable every time they pulsated with black nectar. Like hospital drips, feelers were touching her ankles and wrists. There were at least ten seconds between each pulse, enough for the host to feel dread. But they felt so little. This was a horrific dream, but it was quite pleasant to be locked inside. To know nothing but nothing.

The thing that held her was natural. It was. Not in the sense that it was kind, no. Indeed, now the host knew the whole truth, that this thing didn't even know what love was, it had never spoken to her,it had never told her a thing.

Nihilego had no brain. What it touched merely sought the means to achieve its most base desires. Use Nihilego as an excuse. So long as they came to it and let it feed as it now did. Funnily enough, it was all the host had felt before becoming a part of the parasite. Hunger. For things that perhaps were not edible. And Nihilego was eating - a slithering chrysalis of components and constructs constricting and conforming. Drawing, reforming. Malforming her.

Tentacles skidded across flat, soft, alien rocks, moving without true meaning. The tendrils chinked and clinked as the glassy substance tapped and bounced off of stone. The feelers were so very numerous, overwhelming in density as they writhed. There was no bell to this Nihilego - it had diverted every shard to ensnaring the juicy prey it had secured, losing its form to become a deep web. It could be whatever shape suited it, and the lattice was a good choice for now.

The host felt another swelling from the tentacle plugged into the back of their head, and one of the tendrils around her thighs raised its sharp tip into the air, quivering, sniffing something out. Her unseeing eyes, pupils small as full stops, focused on the feeler that she could not see. She felt like it was there, it was definitely there, but she couldn't see it. Another tendril wrapped over her left arm reached out to touch it and shards transferred between them, clicking as they connected together. The one around her arm became shorter, while the one around her thigh became longer.

If the host was conscious, they'd be afraid that the extended limb was about to plunge into their sex and violate what little was left of them. But that fear would have been unfounded. The white mass extended toward her while keeping its hold over her leg tight, then there was a sucking feeling in the back of her head. If she could think, she'd visualize about all the venom drenched bits of her collapsed brain it was probably ripping away from her. But-

Lillie's eyes focused again. The sucking was the removal of the venom that clogged her head. She saw the tendril, and regarded it with horror as it sloped closer, touching her face languidly. She couldn't feel where it had been against her, all of the nerves in her skin having either shut down to facilitate Nihilego's needs or been removed altogether. It pulled back some.

'Lillie, you're very brave. Your flesh is delicious, and will sustain me for millennia.' Lillie tried to reply but Nihilego had stripped out her lungs, filled them with crystal shards, and for certainty in her silence had taken control of her mouth and kept it hanging, agape. She was hallucinating the voice, refusing to believe she could ever fall prey to a nerveless and empty creature. 'You will not die until my feeding is complete. We will spend a forever together.' As Lillie attempted to move, she realised her whole back was impaled on pieces of Nihilego that had formed a network inside of her, replacing all her organs and veins. The length that had attached to her spine was the port for the annex inside her. She wanted to scream and did not have any systems left in her body to allow her to.

Lillie turned her eyes away from the tendril near her face, and as she did so the tentacle plunged into her like the one that was pumping earlier. This one attached to her cheek, and if she looked down she could see the transparent pieces bulging as they removed little elements of her biomass and took them.

This was how it fed.

It'd strip her down, like a scrap car, like spare parts. Use any biomass it couldn't draw energy from for breeding, to create more pieces of itself. Bulge. Her head felt soggy and unclear again, and the host reclined back into her throne of thorns as more and more tendrils were constructed and deconstructed to form tubes to take parts of her elsewhere, where Nihilego fed on them.

It was like being mummified. The paradoxical, layered nightmare that she couldn't remember was truer than she had thought. Nihilego's host's skin had turned a light blue, and her imitation of breath cast a pallor of dusty particles through the air that shimmered like multicolored gems. There were so many crystals that it was impossible to see in some places where the host ended and the Ultra Space native began, and then where Nihilego's current form was separated from the crystal tree around it.

Again the draining sensation happened and Lillie became conscious. She was so inebriated and entangled that Nihilego was purposefully allowing her moments of consciousness to observe her fear and panic before it dragged her back under the black ocean - not out of malevolence, but idle curiosity. She was experiencing a sensation of violation unlike anything she'd ever felt before - at her mother's hands, at her own hands...

Single shards wriggled in her lap like so many silver maggots. Lillie could watch them, but when she tried to think of their purpose or even what they were she was unable to consider more than two words before she was stopped dead by a powerful, familiar note, an abrasively high pitched tone that rattled and scratched. Nihilego softly warning her that thought was a thing of the past unless she was willing to share. It would share with her, though.

The sound grew too loud and Lillie saw in her mind's eye a horrifying image of herself. Her limbs looked like they were stretched out too far and her eyes were entirely gold, black pupils like islands in glassy, unseeing oceans of necrotic yellow. Clusters of shards grew from her like absurd flowers, and these shards twisted and breathed where she could not.

Nihilego was using her body as a breeding ground, and while she couldn't remember what it had told her, not that she could recall it had told her anything at all, she found peace in the idea she'd die soon.

But Nihilego carefully nursed her mind and soul as she continued to drift in and out of conscious thoughts, being pumped full of venom and shards emerging from her systems before the invasive presence receded and she was lucid for brief seconds. It would not let its love die before it was done feeding... and that, for an immortal, mindless beast like itself, was a long time.