The|MULTIVERSE

"Aaah-man! I'd hate to be the man to lodge himself down this bitch's gaping hell-sophagus. You can't even get a good pump in. Like humping air!"

Ricven slipped down Mertta's pulsating trachea of grotesque horrors like a bonafide fighter fly dive-bombing through a vast tube. Her throaty tunnel, now subsiding from the thunderous quake of her cough, was lined with a spiraling wall of fleshy oak twine, or at least it looked like oak. Living oak. More like ominous cords of obsidian soft wood riddled with seething green fissures smothered in a sinister waft of smog. Not to neglect on the skewing tendons reaching for nothing.

"You never know," Fae said with some positive perk in her high-pitched voice. "Some like this sort of stuff."

Ricven barked amused. "Yeah! Basement dwellers spunking off a fat one to monster girl porn, maybe!"

Fae snorted. "You're one to judge."

"Hey! They imagine the dream, I live it!"

"And soon you shall live NO MORE!"

Choking no more, the voice of Mertta greeted Ricven from within. Her treacherous trachea that seemed to descend for miles on end, just like her taunts, promising his death, as her voice echoed and thrummed; and lashed her vines and stems at her invader.

"I know what comes with you." She continued. "I can feel its bane raking near. How devious! Expected from the last of her kind!"

"I wouldn't call the cutie devious, exactly," Ricven warned as Mertta's tendon vines reached for him in dismal desperation. He casually spun out of her flogging stretch. He was, of course—like always—too damn quick to be caught. And so he shirked her gullet's wriggling whips and movie villain bantering as if second nature. "I see her as a cunning creature of the wood who bends to no salty bitch."

Mertta, for the first time in a while, chortled. The kind of giggle that meant terrible things to come. "Ignorance. There blooms so much you don't know."

"Oh-boy..." Fae said nervously.

Ricven snickered. "Heh! And the plotted plant thickens. Get it?!"

Fae giggled.

Too many vines lunged near. No sweat! The spriggan's vines met the brawny slash of Edge Breaker; pulling the labor until Ricven managed his way into Mertta's chest chamber.

Her hefty bosom cage was as ugly as the rest of her atrocious anatomy. He advanced across hunks of blistering roots and thorny briars, and, after one last advance against her bushy aberrations, he slid to an extreme halt, scarring her woody base with his steel-toe-armored boots, and grinned ear to ear in comical awe.

"Curse your ole wretched heart, baby...!"

The heart of Mertta, that pumping organ mass of creeping plants and roots; a thing of horrors indeed!

Spriggans mimicked the human anatomy in ways that provoked the lame logic of mortals. Mertta owned no fleshy organ; no muscular blood pumper in sight. Instead, a chamber of vile earthy tendons nested within her chest; a cage of throbbing terror!

There, a creature, or at least it looked like one—whatever it was—lied tangled in a queer cluster of quivering briars hung before Ricven. A masculine golem of wood and emerald amber suspended in a network of timbered veins; large plant arteries pumping on overdrive. Filled with green nethra.

"That's the heart of Mertta?" Fae exclaimed. She saw the spriggan's corrupted core through the eyes of Ricven. "It's HUGE and horrendous!"

Ricven shivered in a parody of fear. "And green with poplar envy!" His voice spooky for kicks. "Get it? Poplar—"