Photomanip TF - "Limbless One" (Ball Python TF)

It all started when her neighbors in her complex started acting very strangely. She'd hear chanting through the walls or catch a glimpse out of the corner of her eye of some strange hooded figures moving between apartments. Her neighbors started referring to things around her in strange ways, almost looking through them in a daze. She caught one neighbor talking to a lamp in the hallway and calling it verdant, green, and other such plantlike descriptors. The next day, she did a double take as it seemed one of her neighbors had replaced the lamp with a potted plant. Things proceeded like this for weeks, as she became increasingly distressed and paranoid. The whole building seeming to be different every time she came home from work.

Then, one day they stopped referring to her by name all together, instead calling her "limbless one". The sound of the phrase caused a cold shiver to run up her spine as if her body were rejecting something.

Upon hearing the phrase, she stumbled into her apartment, and stripped down, needing to get out of the constricting clothing, her body feeling like it was in a vice. She felt sick, flashes of heat and clamminess coursing through her veins, nausea setting in. The space heater appeared to taste spicy to her tongue and glow in a strange way. The synesthesia made her head hurt and want to vomit.

She retched and groaned, clutching her sides as she felt her torso squeeze inwards and stretch. She needed to stretch her aching muscles, sticking out her chest, arching her back, but when she did, her body went well past human ranges of motion and literally elongated. She grunted in agony as her insides unwound themselves and her spine popped, each pop lengthening her back, and causing her taught skin to burn as it was pulled unnaturally over her misshapen form.

Her arms and legs weakened and tightened at the same time, her fingers sucking back into her hands. She felt like she was trying to pull them into her body on purpose, like she needed to, but she couldn't stop herself from doing so.

She collapsed to the ground, spasms wracked her body, crunching of bones, her body loose, her spine too flexible to support her upright stance. She tried to scream but only managed a garbled hiss. She couldn't fathom what to say, and then she couldn't even fathom the act of saying. She hissed in agony, trying to scream at whatever was attacking her body, as the panic rose and she felt like she was being attacked by some predator.

She lashed across the floor, her naked body twisting and arching in unnatural ways, her insides itching down to the bone. She felt herself blacking out even as she remained conscious and aware, as if she were simultaneously entering a permanent sleep and waking up at the same time, or rather she couldn't tell which was which, sinking  into a dreamlike trance that slowly became every bit of the snake's vivid reality, too vivid to even process the world around her in any way but through the pull of the snake's thinking...until there was a snake looking around her world.

Later that night, one of the robed figures entered her apartment, of which she no longer understood as anything but a strange place with few hiding spots. The figure approached and she hissed, but he clutched her in a way that prevented the snake from moving as she needed to. She was moved into a terrarium in one of the other apartments where the newly born snake was to live from now on.

Every now and then, there was a moment of lucidity, a kind of dreamlike memory that felt to real. The python screamed in her mind at a horror she couldn't comprehend. She remembered...something...who she was at the same time she wasn't who she was, remembering a lifetime of being a snake and a woman, her world seemed to dissolve into impossible contradictions. For a moment, it was a contradiction that invoked unspeakable terror, incomprehensible and wordless sense of being and not being that drifted through layers of reality that had no language. And then next moment she forgot what had caused her a serpent's form of anxiety and went back to tasting the air. Fortunately, for the snake, these moments became less and less frequent over the peaceful repetition of the snake's life while the cultists went about their business doing things she couldn't care about at all except that she liked them for making hunting so easy. One day this echo of memory happened again, and after that it never did again, and the limbless one went about her business as she always had.

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Sorry it's been awhile y'all. This time of year is usually really hectic for me and I got behind on a lot of projects, spread myself too thin. But fortunately, the worst of it is over now.