She had taken all she could, but the pain was unbearable now. The headache pounding in her skull had drowned out all sound, all thought, until even her need for the release of crying was forgotten as she lay balled up on the floor of her cell. How many forms had these things inside her taken now? How many times had her flesh been ripped apart and knitted back together in some hideous form just to have the doctor come, use his tools, drugs and incantations to subdue her, so that he could cut away what had grown from her for his bizarre work?

At first, the pain of changing shape was enough to drive her out of her mind. In time, though, through form after form, she had grown more accustomed to the process. The headache would come like a barrage of mortar fire inside her head, followed by the sensation of flesh tearing itself apart, growing, bones reordering, and the very fabric of her body reinventing itself into something different, violent and powerful.

This time was different. As the headache subsided and she prepared for what she expected to be another transformation, her only sensation was a tight knotting deep inside her stomach. Not the cracking of bones, or the tearing and reconstruction of flesh this time, no. A sense of nausea overcame her, like some extreme form of morning sickness. Her first cough was quickly followed by a barrage of deep heaves. Sweat poured. Blood poured from her mouth as she vomited. Wave after wave of convulsions left her feeling as though her very organs had been torn apart. For a moment, she caught her breath, and dared to wonder if maybe it was all over.

One, final spasm twisted her entire form, every muscle in her body contracting at once in an attempt to force some alien thing out of her. A ball of meat, bloody and black, and larger than both her fists combined, shot from her mouth onto the floor. As she lay doubled up on the floor beside the mess, she watches as the it began to grow, doubling, then quadrupling then continuing to increase it's mass exponentially. Liquid from the pool it had made congealed and formed into a fleshy base that dug itself into the floor. The core, the ball of sinewy meat that was the solid part of what she had thrown up, elongated, seeming to amass muscle and bone out of nothing. Bony tendrils stretched up the sides of the column of flesh that had grown. A blood curdling scream came as this beast, this column of growing flesh, culminated in a large, wedge shaped orifice, spine like tentacles and opening in a lamprey like mouth ringed by small, finger like appendages.

The beast writhed in it's birth pangs, then bent over to the woman from whom it had sprang, it's circular mouth wide. The cilia-fingers around the mouth wrapped around her head and face, and it lifted her from the floor. Rising as far as it could in the small room, it's form bend and snaking as it doubled over to avoid hitting the ceiling, the creature held the woman's form aloft, her eyes closed night now, her mouth slack jawed and drooling.