>>5398097There is one other whom you owe a visit, though—one more important even than elves, perhaps. You ask Jazkarmel how Glowie is doing. When you last left the glow-worm, she was early in her metamorphic process, embedded in the heart of a great cocoon, transforming from ‘princess’ to a proper insectoid empress… And preparing to lay the eggs which contain your offspring.
“This was the other reason I asked for you to hurry,” Jazkarmel explains. “The elves attending to her say she is soon to emerge.”
That IS big news—even if perhaps it is silly and sentimental of you to think of it as such. You can’t help it. You travel with brisk footfalls to the hidden silk-filled grotto where the two slim elven androgenes (skilled in the peculiarities of arthropod midwifery in service to the spiders, centipedes, and beetles who often accompany darke-lf scouts) attend to Glowie’s needs. They attempt to slow your approach, explaining the need for care and quiet, for she is apparently emerged, and resting.
“Her shell yet hardens,” one of the twin-like elves explains. “Her booklungs are still filling with fresh air, after so long in transformation.”
“She requires sleep,” the other explains. “You should only visit sparingly, until she—”
You shove past them, as politely as you can manage, assuring them that you will take all due precautions and cause the worm-woman no undue upset… But you desires to see her, and so you WILL see her.
And see her you do—ALL of her.
Glowie had warned you of the scope of her transformation, and her mother’s own titanic form had given you some idea of what to expect. Still, it is quite the a shock in spite of this. She lacks her mother’s tendinous, trailing egg-sack, though you can see the beginnings of one developing—even at its current ‘small’ size easily as large and heavy as two of you. Her body proper, one almost serpentine in shape, is now rigidly segmented coated in a thin, carapace of spines , spikes, and rolling domed shell. Her exterior coating, still hardening, is semi-transparent; behind its translucency, you can see the dark shapes of new, enlarged organs swelling and contracting in motion alternatingly rhythmic and spasmatic. Her head and limbs remain thin, gracile, but still longer and more heavily-armoured than once they were; where before she stood almost as tall as you, she now towers at twice your height, enough to fill much of the small space which she has been allocated…
Or she would, if she were not shrinking to the far edge of the room, grasping and tugging the remnants of her silken cocoon as if it were a blanket to cover her modesty. She says nothing—cannot form words, you suspect, in this form. Her Amulet of Disguise, useless now to transform and hide so fundamentally different a form, is clutched weakly to what passes for the insectoid behemoth’s chest.
“…Sorry.”
