Giant centipede eggs are, if lucky, stuffed into a warm corpse and buried underground. The corpse provides insulation for the temperature-dependent eggs and if it hasn’t completely rotted by the time they hatch, it also provides a first meal for the hatchlings. The eggs are affixed deep within the corpse by a thick jelly that holds them in place and protects them from dehydration and parasites. When the eggs burst, the released amniotic fluid chemically reacts with this jelly, liquifying it so the young can move freely out of their incubator.
This liquified jelly was now rushing down Prey’s legs, mixing with the rain water in the earth below him. As the last of it dribbled out of him, the pressure in his intestines released, offering some relief from an uncomfortable tightness that had plagued the boy for months. This releif was short-lived however, immediately followed by the vigorous thrashing of baby centipedes eager to try out their new bodies. Normally, the incubation corpse would be soft enough by hatching time that even newborns could rip and tear and eat their way out. But Prey’s brood found themselves within the sturdy inner walls of a still very alive mother. They attempted to follow instinct, digging into Prey’s innards with blunted claws and tiny mouths, and the transparent flow of fluid out of Prey ran pink from their efforts. But they were not old enough yet to pierce living flesh and so, eventually, they found their way down to the only exit.
Suffice to say, this was not at all pleasant for Prey, who would not be spared the pain of childbirth, despite his sex.
His legs liquified like the jelly inside him and he collapsed onto Red, who eased him onto the ground. Giant Centipedes parents are not normally present for their clutch's hatching, and so this was as foreign an experience to Red as it was to Prey. Neither knew what to expect or how to respond. Fortunately or unfortunately, the newborns did most of the work themselves.
By now, Prey was on his back, head resting on Red, legs bent and spread, struggling just to breathe steadily. It was horrifying, the feeling of little insects digging around within him, looking for a way out...or trying to make one. All his time carrying them had not prepared him for this. He closed his eyes and made one last prayer to a half-remembered god of a dead species that this would be over soon. Whether he lived or died, he prayed it would be swift. His fingers gouged into the wet dirt and he hissed to Red, “HURTS!” He repeated it, over and over again, using his second language every time. There was some scrap of comfort to be had knowing that at least something could understand his pain. That he was not entirely alone in the experience. Red for his part did not respond. It was one of the few times he fell silent, antennae fixed on Prey’s belly, awaiting his young to burst out at any moment. Empathy was not a common emotion of the centipedes, but something stirred in the back of his arthropodal mind. Something dusty with disuse. Perhaps by some stretch of interpretation, he even felt sadness in this moment, regret for ever laying eggs inside Prey. It was nothing more than a tingle, buried under the usual piloting instincts, but it was there. Unignorable, like an itch at the base of his antannae.
“Hurts! Red! Hurts!” Prey cried again, invoking Red’s own name, which made the itch flare up. He could feel the young moving inside him. It was painfully crowded in there for both them and their mother. The birth could have been much more orderly and swift if Centipede young only knew how to form a line. But they did move. The pace was agonizingly slow, but little by little they inched their way towards sunlight.
And when the pain became too much to bear, Prey turned to his side and threw his arms around Red. He clung there, limp as a long-dead corpse, his cries melting into a low, drawn out, unintelligible sound. In the moments just before the first birth, he shut his eyes and allowed the usual hallucinations to overtake him. Snapshots of places no longer remembered in full, his mother’s face, the sleeping pods, the reflection of his healthier self before all this. The visions behind his eyelids overwhelmed him and washed him away into vast psychic ocean. A helpless speck adrift in an uncaring world. There was nothing and no one else, just him and the vastness and its horrors. It was the same feeling that pervaded life here since the start, but it was now that he felt it most acutely. Total anomie just before birth. Darkness before dawn.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the face of Red, bent down to gaze at him from inches away. It was so rare that he got to see Red’s face above ground in the light. But it was a strangely welcome sight for Prey. He recognized it only now as truely a kind of face. His wine-red hue, black unblinking eye clusters, twitching black-tipped claws, there was an otherworldly handsomeness to it all. It took the place of a comforting human face, and Prey did not mind the difference. It was, even, on some scale of relativity, a cousin of his own mammalian visage. He might have woken to the new world and found something as alien as giant carnivorous plants or predatory cnidarians, but he had the luck of meeting a fellow bilaterian. The itch in the back of Red’s mind found itself mirrored in Prey.
The first born of the brood had now made its way to Prey’s anus, and with all the fury of its father’s species, began to emerge. Prey shrieked as it’s spikey little body slipped out of that sensitive region. It was followed by the others shortly after, all fighting to be second and third in birth order now that an exit had been found. In just a few minutes, all six of the newborns were birthed. There had been more eggs laid, but the centipede egg survival rate was low. Most of the others had not even made it past the earliest stages of development. Six was actually quite large for a single brood, and Red chittered with excitement. The excitement of new life was not lost even on a species such as his own. The rest of the egg debris would pass through Prey later, but for now, the task was complete.
Prey turned his weary eyes onto the young. They lay in a wet pile between his legs, colored a stark white. In the tangled pile, their body shape was not immediately clear, but as Prey’s eyes began to pick out the details, the genetic miracle that had occurred within him became clear. The newborns were not centipedes. Neither were they human. They were something of a mix. Tiny human infant torsos attached to thin multi-legged bodies. Hybrids.
Centipede eggs occasionally adopted traits of their host corpses due to some near-magical inovation of evolution not known to Myrio's world. But this was an event that escaped all explanation. A momentous event that would set on course the eventual intertwining of two species.
The newborns squirmed and cried, their chubby baby hands grasping blindly, their lower bodies twirling and thrashing about, as if unaware that they had already escaped the womb. Their cries were strange and squeaking, mewls and tiny little clicks. They writhed in the sun, burning in its harsh light. Prey stared at them with a dumb expression. They were nothing like the nightmares he’d had. They were so small and fragile, so… like himself.
Maternal instinct burst from his heart and gushed out of him, overflowing, covering and transforming him. His body moved without conscious command, scooping up the babies, HIS babies, up against his chest to shield them from the sun. The tear tracks of pain on his cheeks renewed with tears of joy. He pressed the fresh slimy young to to his face and babbled unintelligbly as they did. Red only watched from over his shoulder, perplexed by this display of emotion. Something he could not understand, though he tried. Maybe with practice.
It took a while for Prey’s unintelligible sobbing to calm enough to form bursts of human language.
“My babies! I’m… I… I love you!” He choked, rocking them gently in his arms. The babies, now shaded from the sun, calmed. They were tiny, heads smaller than Prey’s palms, centipede bodies thin as his withered arms. It was hard to believe these tiny helpless white things had come from an apex predator like Red.
“Precious!” Prey shouted, “Precious! Precious!”
Eventually, Prey would be back in the den, curled around his six newborn children in the safety of the dark. But for now, in the sun of the afterstorm, he prayed a prayer of thanks that he was allowed to birth them in the light of day and look upon their faces.
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