Jamie was ready, protected by Nui from the beasts she sought, and she knew where the greatest of them lived. Her little town's Museum of Ancient History wasn't much to speak of, a half dozen rooms in an old townhouse, but that basement she'd seen had stretched deeper and deeper, brick and concrete giving way to the veins of the earth itself. She did not know then the name of the creature awaiting her, but Jamie knew that it thrilled her, excited her, would welcome her.
She tugged the oversized clothes of her old life around her body and stepped out into the rapidly cooling night. The fog had rolled from the boardwalk over the town and she knew there wasn't much chance of a bus or cab tonight. But she could, and did, walk. She'd forgotten shoes in her haste, but in the cooling night, the fog wreathed streets were pleasant underfoot, like stepping on the scales of a great creature, the great creature that awaited her.
She panted slightly, walking. Her new form was not athletic, and she was driven to distraction by the thought of the creature in the basement of the museum. Whatever ancient thing it was, she speculated endlessly on toads, tentacles, demons, dragons, worms. She could not have said how long it took, nor if she saw anyone on the streets before she arrived at the exterior of the Museum of Ancient History. Lights out, locked up, leaning slightly over the street with its dismal brick facade. She took a deep breath and scanned the street. No one to stop her from picking up a loose brick and throwing it through one of the windows then slipping in.
Nui, the shield, protected her, the broken glass like a caress on her skin, though it tore her clothes. The sweater she'd found was ripped open from belly to collar, hanging open over her torso. She left it, in a hurry to get on with it before the alarms or neighbors brought unwanted guests her way. She was not as familiar with the museum as she'd been as a child, spending summer days there under the tutelage of the docents, but she remembered an old door, felt the call of it. It loomed in the darkness behind one of the exhibits of Babylonian tablets. It was unlocked, cracked open, broken even. Someone had come before her here, to seek the creature.
A rival, she wondered as she opened the door and breathed deeply of the musty mildewy darkness behind it. Her phone light shone like a star as she lit it up, revealing an old storage room with several shattered crates. It looked like they had once held down the trapdoor that was now left open to her, revealing the damp carved stone stairs beyond.
Down she crept, and further down, the weak baleful light of her phone casting long shadows as stone stairs gave way to meandering tunnels, damp and reeking, and she went down further. Her skin and clothes were smudged and muddied but even when she slipped and fell fifteen feet she arose unharmed. Nui was protecting her on her journey to the beast. At last, she arrived at the end of the snaking downward drifting tunnel, a dark opening into a cave that her phone could not pierce as she approached. She could hear a great shivering wind before her, feel the hot gusts of breath in and out, and the gentle sound of weeping.
She shut her phone off and listened then, and heard an argument in two voices, one resonant and dreadful, the other trembling and thin.
"I am Styita, The Grid of God, The Forgotten Tether, tying this world to the next. My duty is to guard the way, and one day to open it once more," the dreadful voice, all lead bells and broken bones, said.
"No! I'm Samantha!" The trembling thin voice said. "I'm a college student and..."
"I am Styita, the Glorious Way, the Living Bridge, who cracked the marrow of the world and drinks it down," the dreadful voice said then.
"I..." the trembling voice said, "...there was a mask?"
Listening from the edge where she had perched Jaime realized that like herself, this monster had not always been this way. Something had happened to make it. Still not having seen it she leaned forward into the darkness to look and inadvertently dropped her phone over the edge, to shatter on stone some ways below.
All of a sudden the voices ceased and there was a rushing sloshing noise, as of wet fabric being dragged over concrete, and a dim blue light began to glow. The creature, Styita-Samantha, was glowing, and as Jamie began to see it, it saw her too.
It was enormous, that she had guessed already, a sinuous body like a flatworm easily forty feet long. Along its body were numerous circles, now glowing a bioluminescent blue, illuminating the wriggling cilia along the edge of its body. Toward what seemed to be the front of the thing it bulged up into a rounded head, made of white fired clay, riddled with cracks. This was the face that spoke with the deep and dreadful voice, now calling to her. Its body glistened as it lifted up to see her.
"What," the terrible voice, breaking timber and children's wails, "are you?"
As it spoke Jamie thought she could almost see something in its mouth but she put that thought aside. "I am Jamie Prescott, the Yāmā who has come as called by Māyā."
The creature seemed puzzled and began to speak once more but was interrupted, "I know-" then there was a terrible scream and the thing's jaw opened wide, revealing that what Jamie had noticed before was not its tongue, but the upper body of a young woman where a tongue should be. Naked, slick with saliva, her hair hangs around her head lank and her face was red with tears, her voice hoarse with arguing. "You have to help me," she cried, reaching out for Jamie, "I'm losing myself to it. I don't want-"
The mouth slammed shut like a stone gateway and the enormous thing growled, body arching as it proclaimed. "I am Styita! I am the Fetid Fetter of Life, Death, and that which is beyond! I am no longer that weakling, and I know of no such thing as a Yāmā."
That gave Jamie pause for a moment. The changes enacted on the two of them were not linked in that way, it seemed. She only paused for a moment and smiled, wickedly. "I am not here at this time, Styita, to cross the border you guard. I am not here at this time to revoke your metamorphosis. I am here to do as is my sacred duty, and carry forth your seed."
The thing seemed at war with itself, but Jamie knew that the spell of feeling she had cast was true. This thing had a need to breed, and she could feel its attention on her growing even as the remnants of its old self resisted. "You are a priestess?" The dreadful voice asked, teeth clamping down to stop a wailing moan of despair from Samantha.
"Styita, I am a priestess and witch of old ways from far places. I am here to carry forth your gift to the world above."
The thing growled, taking Jamie in with coldly calculating black eyes behind the white porcelain of its face. "You would carry the seed of the three-fold gateway above to the world of light?" It chuckled, "You are a priestess whether you know it or not." The thing slithered forward, more wet noises on stone as it masked face came close to Jaime and then bowed down, the broad annelid body providing a route to the bottom of the bowl-shaped cave it dwelled it.
Jamie stepped on the back of its rounded porcelain head, bare feet first on body-warmed clay and then on the wet doughy softness of its great body. She took this makeshift bridge to the floor of the cave, where the great glowing thing curled around her. It seemed at war with itself before the mask snapped open again and Samantha started to speak, "You-"
Jamie did not let her finish, backhanding the girl into stunned silence. "I have no use of you, child. I seek the monster."
Samantha screamed as the mask shut slowly around her and the voice of Styita rumbled around Jamie, "Then see if you can take it."
Its body writhed, coiling tighter around her, cilia on the edge of its body finding her clothes. Somehow wet and fleshy and sharp the carved away at her clothes, leaving them in tatters on the floor. Jamie stood naked, but for the signs of Nui, the shield, as Stiyita rolled to its side, gasping, and displaying a slit down the center of its body the height of a doorway, all scarred and puckered flesh. Jamie stepped forward as the slit split open, steam rising from it and a fetid wash of thick fluid. Slipping out with the fluid was Styita's member, a wrist-thick piece of white flesh that writhed as it spooled free. Its head was a flaring paddle of flesh that seemed to breathe in time with the great beast. As Jamie stepped closer she felt it slap wetly on her thigh, enough force to bruise.
She shuddered as the prehensile member found its way to her sex far smaller than it must have been designed or evolved for. She shivered and grabbed hold of the trembling razor-sharp cilia with her hands as she spread her legs and the thing began to force itself into her. Her body lit up instantly with pleasure and she staggered forward, against Styita's body. The flared member was filling her, writhing inside her, and she pressed herself to the slime coated body of the loathsome monster. It began to pump in and out of her, catching on the internal walls with that great raggedly flaring paddle.
She leaned deeper, breathing in the rank scent of sweat, mildew, and blood of the creature as it thrust harder and harder. She came quickly, and several times as it worked her. She pictured not merely her mate, but a belly swollen with its brood and teats fat with corrupted milk. She pictured her own power, drawn out of these memory-children of the monster. She came again, but Styita was a great beast and its body slow to release its precious seed. Jamie writhed, screamed, cried out, came again as the flared paddle blossomed within her, enough to crack bones where she not protected, and then something flooded her and the great creature thrashed around her.
She came in time with it as a flood of ice-cold seed filled her. Her eyes closed she started to pull away, but found herself unable, and heard a great chuckle all around her. She opened her eyes and saw that she had been drawn, up to the shoulders, into the creature.
"Foolish priestess. None may escape the tether of Styita. Now you will forever be my concubine within my folds, and soon you will tell me the way to freedom."
Jamie cried out in sudden rage as she was pulled further deeper into the thing's body. It took her seconds to find her voice but at last she said, "I will give you one chance, Styita, as my mate, to free me, or I will destroy you utterly."
The thing merely laughed once more as she disappeared into its darkness.
Jamie turned, slowly, and held her breath. She could not be harmed by it, not while the shield of Nui lasted and it was a mate for her. She had only a little breath but luckily the ritual she remembered only required a little.
"Upe ānhu rānhu hipa e wāke." She gurgled in the wet darkness. She said it the sacred five times and then heard the scream of pain, felt the tightness around her. She closed her eyes and merely listened to tearing flesh and cracking bone. She could not be harmed, she reminded herself, as the Cover was cast over Styita, turning it to a human form. It took a long time for it to change, and to die, unable to do anything but split open as it shrank around the shielded woman within it.
At last, once all was silent save for panting breath, Jamie opened her eyes. There was a dim glow from the things blood and from her own swollen belly she realized. She also soon realized she was not alone. The girl Samantha was there, human once more. Apparently, the cover had separated them and spared her.
Jamie spared her no second thought as she staggered to her feet and began the long climb to the surface where...