Erica still sat on the forest ground, allowing her spasming cocks to run their course as she kept her eyes locked with the hairy woman. The woman matched her stare dispassionately, her long hair fluttering in the morning wind. While the thick dark fur that covered her belly and thighs was what had drawn Erica's attention at first, upon closer observation the woman also had a noticeable halo of thin whiskers coming from her small pink nose.
Erica took a single calming breath, then a second, and then, curling one leg under her seated form and putting her weight on the balls of her feet, she moved faster than she had in her entire life. The woman did not attempt to avoid her, if she even could have, as Erica launched herself through the air and tackled the figure to the ground. Erica held her down, not that she was offering any resistance, and flicked her tongue in the woman's face.
"I don't know what's happening in the forest, or what's happening to me, or who you are," Erica hissed, "but I do know that you smell like a meal."
She smiled, "You've adjusted quickly. And yes, most of the forest knows to avoid one of your temperament. As you have me now there's nothing I could do to prevent you from squeezing the life from my body and swallowing me whole."
When Erica had threatened the woman she hadn't even thought about the logistics of eating an adult human-shaped person, but as the woman laid it out Erica begin to think about smothering the warm furry life pinned beneath her, listening to her bones crack, and fitting every inch of her down her gullet. Her heart skipped a beat. But... "despite that you wanted to talk to me."
"Because I saw an opportunity."
Erica felt a rustle beneath her, and then felt a warm appendage brushing along the inside of her thigh. It was soft and fleshy, not furry like the woman's belly, a tail, and it toyed with her gently.
"I have lived in this forest for 400 years. My mentor passed down all the knowledge she had gathered in her 700 years of life, and her mentor before her did as well with her 700 years. From two millennia of knowledge I can tell you two things: that anyone who has been transformed by this forest like us can never leave it, and that there has never been anyone transformed by the goddess the way you have."
For a few moments Erica let those words sink in. The forest sounds gently rolled over them, and behind that were scents that Erica's new body was starting to learn to track. More things like the woman, not human, not animal, but something adjacent. "OK-" Erica paused as she realized that she did not have a name for the woman, and then considered the possibility that an animal such as herself might not use names, "-let's say I believe you, Scholar. What does this mean to me?"
The woman smiled as she understood that Erica had addressed her, and that she had captured the girl's attention. "I have lived a good life in the Cradle, as have most of our community. I could die here contented, and I think in time you could learn to as well. But I believe that, by the whim of fate, you have the opportunity to leave this place."
Erica leaned back slightly, no longer forcing her full weight against the tall woman. Looking into her dark eyes Erica still saw what her body told her that the Scholar was: food. Something to hunt and to kill. But even as she breathed crisp air into her new body, heart and loins and belly burning with desire, she still retained enough of herself to see that denying herself in the moment could lead to greater fulfilment of her lusts later. With a flick she felt Scholar's tail trace the space between her hanging hemipenes and then curl up across her butt.
"You came here with four humans last night. If at least two of them are still human, we may have the opportunity to use them to leave this place. They will have to die, of course," Scholar ended flatly.
"But how," Erica attempted to puzzle out Scholar's plan before the morality the implied action was even considered. The memory of the previous night was still fresh in Erica's mind, as she tore open her own body like a bag of chips, and she was still basking in the feeling of living within an ideal body. Consolidating this magic, and what her place in the human world now was, was a topic for when the afterglow had left her. "Their skin," Erica said, drawing the connection, "You need their skin."
"We need their skin." Scholar's nose twitched slightly. This had been the coin flip she'd staked her life on, "So, White Serpent, do I have your confidence?"