No One's Prey.

There I stood, awkwardly clutching at my 'sword' with both of my hands, as the beautiful white flowers rustled around me. It was a short, ugly thing, its grip discolored by sweat, its edge nicked from hard use. Beads of sweat trickled down my forehead from both exertion and fear.

Fear of the figure who stood a few yards away from me.

Dwarfed only by the ever-twisting mass of thick, crooked roots in endless fractals, as beautiful as they were alien, under the glow of her dear brother's Haligtree, she stood. She was tall - hauntingly so - but such was to be expected of her ilk, the demigods of the Lands Between.

Fear of the implications attached to the upcoming clash.

And on the other side, I stood, wearing gray chainmail over bleached leathers. My arms trembled and my heart beat fiercely in anticipation. It was nearly inconceivable that I had been produced by such a being, but the rot that united us both had produced far more unlikely results.

Fear of my mother, the Blade of Miquella, who shot towards me.

There was no shout of warning. No sound to foretell her coming. In a second, there were yards in between us - the other, she was standing right beside me, her gilded prosthetic arm bringing her longsword, also of unalloyed gold, down upon me.

Just barely, I managed to duck and drop into a roll, coming up to my feet behind Mother. My body moved of instinct's volition, slashing upwards at her thigh - the jolt of the impact, which made me grit my teeth, only confirmed my fears. I had hit her prosthetic, completely unfeeling leg.

Mother wasted no time to exploit my opening, twisting her body around, fast as lightning. Her sword came close to slamming into my chest - and knowing that the blunted edge she used against me wouldn't kill me was of no comfort whatsoever as I quickly backpedaled away to disengage.

That had been the opportunity she had been waiting for.

Mother's left hand gripped my throat and lifted me up into the air with ease. I struggled with all of my might, kicking at her arm as I fought for purchase and tried to free myself from the confines of her calloused hand. In truth, all that I got for my effort was dropping my sword to the ground.

I felt the air rush past my ears as I was thrown upwards. I clawed at nothing and somehow managed to turn myself around, only to catch a glimpse of what awaited me below. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl, as I witnessed mother removing her golden helmet, and then...

Then she unhinged her jaws.

A scream died in my throat as the entirety of my upper body entered Mother's, and darkness beckoned me further. A lot of warm, slimy saliva waited in her mouth to coat me and lubricate my journey to the demigod's guts.

Her twitching tongue stayed put in the bottom of her mouth, refusing to lap my taste as I went down. It wasn't out of hunger she ate me, after all.

But eat me she did. My face slid against many warm, fleshy surfaces on my way down. Mother was an experienced predator, and it showed. She knew just what to do, just where to hold me. Her veteran throat opened up easily, accepting my body down into the depths of her digestive tract.

Mother rocked her head back repeatedly, gulping my body down to my waist, my legs practically hanging limp outside of her lips. I knew there was no use in resisting past this point, so I just... Went down, feeling as the warmth of her insides nearly penetrated straight to my bones.

Where others would have felt nothing but utter despair and wrongness, my mind was filled with complete bliss. The warmth, the wet embrace of her innards... It just felt right, to be inside my Mother's body, like I had never been before - I was a product of the rot, after all, not of herself.

And still, she loved me all the same.

My head was sent through the gullet first, poking into what I knew to be her rank stomach. This was one of the many moments I actually felt grateful for the scarlet rot - for it had taken my sense of smell - and kept me from experiencing what her prey normally would.

My feet didn't dally long on the outside, though the difference of temperature in between my Mother's insides and the outside of her body made me want the process to be faster. I felt my shoes slipping off my feet, before Mother closed her lips and took a final gulp.

And with that, I was completely sealed inside the demigod's digestive tract, my head dipping into a thick pool of slop and chyme currently sloshing down there, composed of whatever half-digested mush remained of Mother's dinner.

The natural contraction of the stomach walls forced me past the acidic slime, compacting my body into a fetal position, my knees tucked into my chest. The walls felt slimy, with wrinkly grooves that served to secrete viscous gastric acids all over my body...

Yet I felt no fear.

"Hahhh..." I could hear Mother's muffled sigh of satisfaction as she made her way back to her place at the Haligtree, my fleshy containment shifting around, throwing chyme all over my body. And still, I knew not the tingling of the acids, for they were completely absent.

"Maeryn." I had been about to settle against the comfortable walls of her stomach when I heard her voice. Muffled as it was by several layers of flesh and fat and muscle, there was no mistaking the graveness it held. She was not pleased by my performance, it seemed.

"... Forgive me... Mother, I-." I tried to talk to her in such a way that she could hear me, but there was no response. I was about to try harder but... I felt something shift. Something had just changed in the way her stomach saw me, and I could instinctively tell.

My heart worked up a pace as the now unforgiving stomach walls started to massage and knead my skin in a different way. The temperature burst through the metaphorical ceiling, and I felt the long-since-stilled rot within my skin starting to writhe.

"M-mother?! What is going on?!" I sputtered, pushing as hard as I could with my arms and legs against the stomach walls.

They gave out for an inch or two, before constricting even tighter after a wet belch from the demigod shook my confines yet again.. I coughed and spat out various stomach fluids that constantly kept getting into my mouth after I tried to speak.

"Mo... Mother! Please, you have to let me out! It is starting to burn!"

And yet, despite me struggling as fiercely as I could, the only result was that I tired myself down. The stomach ultimately just did its job - it constricted me. And no matter how much I screamed and called, I heard no answer from Mother.

Before I could panic any further, her stomach tightened. Almost impossibly tight it became, and I thought for sure that was my end - I had seen it happen before to another of Mother's preys - the way she simply crushed them inside of her by pressing down on her stomach.

But then my body was forcibly pushed up through the throat and ejected out of Mother's mouth in a matter of seconds, colliding with the cold, packed dirt below, along with the rest of the demigod's various stomach contents that had kept me company inside.

"Mnghhh--!" I cried out upon impact, curling up into a ball, shivering from the sudden temperature change, my body hurting all over. I writhed in a shallow pool of acid and half-digested food mush that clung to my hair and sodden clothes.

And all the while, my mother just stood there, arms crossed over her chest as she watched me silently - not through her eyes, those had been lost to the rot - and yet the seriousness of her expression left no room for doubt.

I had displeased her greatly, and that hurt much more than her stomach.

"Learn well the lesson I dispense, Maeryn." Mother said. "I have kept you safe within me whenever we sparred thus far. No more. For you have grown soft, and others won't offer you this kindness. You are my son, Maeryn - you are no one's prey."