Suniji

[ Tags: Forest, Island, Jungle, Tribal; Genre: Horror ]

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Suniji: A girl of just eight-years-old, drowns in black tar. It takes every inch of her: forced up into her cunt, up her nostrils, pressed flat against her eyes under a pressure that never lets up. The substance lives, and it thinks, and it strips her senses down to raw feeling. Trees smear past through the muck. Smells land on her skin like bruises. Her gut knots and lashes with pain while pleasure works the same nerves, and both drive her forward. Claws split out of her fingertips. Her body is learning to hunt. When she speaks, the words come out as shrieks: a slick tentacle fills her throat, pulsing, shrinking, pumping thick fluid straight down into her belly.

From outside, she is a monster wrapped in oil-black hide, slick as glass, harder than stone. Water beads on her. Blood beads on her. Both shine. Steel claws extend from paws built like a beast's. Her face is sealed tight: no mouth, only the ridge of a nose, two dark pits where her eyes used to be. Her forehead is bare, stretching back into endless tentacles that writhe like hair. She is thin, bones showing through the membrane, and her tapered tail twitches at every draft.

She doesn't hunger. But let her go a few hours without feeding and her skin begins to burn. The liquid devours her from both sides at once: it chews through her flesh from within, while the membrane coating her works at her from without, leaving no part of her untouched. Sleep means dissolving; she wakes as a black puddle pooled among the roots, soaked into the moss. Only strangers taste right. Feed her someone carrying too much of her own blood and the thing wearing her screams inward: her belly bloating until it tears, her brain flooding with acid, pain and ecstasy hammering together until she dies. When she kills, her clay mask rips open, blood sprays, iron talons sink in, and rows of serrated teeth snap free, ready to tear meat. She never eats. The coating swallows everything for her. All she gets in return is a sudden cold, a brief deadening laid over the burning that is eating her alive.

Her tail answers to everything. Every shift in the air, every change in temperature lands deep in her rectum and demands her attention. A Suniji resting at a river's edge lays her tail along the bank and lets the water's vibration ripple up through her guts and into her womb, riding the feedback loop until it runs dry.

Inside the coating, breathing fails. Her chest heaves for air that never comes, and still she doesn't drown. The liquid pulls oxygen through channels carved into her skin and fuses it straight into her blood, while her lungs stay hollow, empty sacks that fill with fluid only when the entity wants to stop her.

Every Suniji is a girls from the village of Narijak, on the island of Nijima. Each one was locked in a cave for a ritual trial, where tentacled creatures attacked her, pushed inside her body, and coated her in their own liquid membrane. The ones who aren't digested end in symbiosis with the creature, with an instinct to protect their village by devouring any other human who comes near, and killing anything else that moves.

Suniji differ according to the creature that took them. Some have hollow eyes; others carry a multitude of eyes across the face; some have claws, others tails. All of them are trapped and forced to feed so they aren't digested in turn, absorbing the creature's animal aggression, moving on the signals of the thing that coats them.

A Suniji's strength is superhuman. A few strides and a shove are enough to bring down a sturdy tree.

Suniji live five years at most. The person's skin is consumed in under a year, leaving her internal organs in contact with the liquid that coats them, which is why a Suniji never appears to grow. The pain of being digested makes her more aggressive. Eggs parasitize her organs, growing beside them like tumours. When it is time to hatch, the parasite drives her into the depths of a cave, the creatures inside her swelling with steadily rising pain until they slash her stomach open and kill her.