You accept this gift

You walk with them inside you.

The forest does not resist. It parts around your steps as if recognizing something it has long been waiting for. The scar-path curves like a vein, pulsing faintly underfoot, and you follow it without question.

The insects have gone quiet. No more stings, no more whispers. But you feel them. Not just as weight or movement. You feel them the way you feel thoughts—tiny impulses fluttering at the edge of awareness. Their silence is not absence; it is brooding. Waiting.

You brood with them.

Each step drags heavy because you think too much. You remember every face that ever turned from you. Every time you begged with your eyes for someone to see you and they didn’t. Every moment of being unwanted. The brood presses against your bones as if echoing those thoughts, reminding you of their presence, their acceptance.

You touch your chest where the filaments sealed you. The skin there is puckered, translucent, a window more than a wound. Beneath, you see a faint light flicker—yellow, pulsing like fireflies. Not your heartbeat anymore. Theirs.

You walk until the air grows close and wet, the trees bending to form a low vault overhead. Moss dangles in ropes. The ground squishes underfoot, black water rising ankle-deep. You smell iron and vinegar, sweet rot.

And then it begins.

A cramp twists your stomach. You double over, gasping. Your hands plunge into the swamp-mud and come up dripping black strings of algae. The brood stirs. Not as before, not just crawling. They are stretching. Testing your insides like chicks pressing at eggshell.

You gag and spit up bile thick with wings. Not whole insects yet—just husks, soft and jelly-like, translucent wings fluttering weakly before melting in the water.

our throat burns.

Still you do not resist.

You let it happen.

The brood is yours. You are theirs. You brood on this truth like an ember in your skull, rolling it over and over until the heat of it fills your thoughts: this is belonging, this is wanted.

The pressure rises again, sharper now. You stagger to a tree, brace yourself. The bark is soft, pliant, sinking beneath your palms as if the tree wishes to hold you upright.

Your skin trembles. Tiny ridges shift beneath the surface of your arms, your ribs, your thighs. Welts split open into mouths, not wide but enough to reveal something pale within. A shimmer of wings. A needle limb. They are pushing.

You sag against the tree, chest heaving. Every breath feels double—your lungs drawing air, their wings beating inside you. The rhythms sync, diverge, sync again. A choir inside your body.

The first breaks free.

A hot rupture tears across your shoulder blade. You cry out—not from pain exactly, but from the sudden relief of pressure. Something forces its way through: a slick, translucent body the size of a bird, wings snapping wetly against your back. It clings to your skin with hooked limbs, then lifts away into the air. Its glow is faint, yellow-white, casting a shadow across your face.

You do not flinch. You watch it rise.

Another splits free from your thigh. Another bursts through your side, leaving behind a seam that closes even as you stagger. More press at the gaps of your flesh, wriggling, biting, forcing themselves out. Each one tears you open but you do not bleed. Instead, clear gel leaks, strings down your body, mingling with the swamp water.

One by one they hatch. Dozens. Hundreds.

They do not scatter. They circle you, wings humming in tight formation. Their bodies pulse with light, faint at first but brightening with each pass. The hollow fills with the glow of them, fireflies multiplied a thousand-fold. The air vibrates.

Your body slumps, yet you do not collapse. The swarm holds you aloft with the sheer pressure of their wings, lifting your hair, tugging at your arms. They do not leave you behind.

You are their hive.

Even as they depart your body, you remain tethered. The wounds where they emerged knit over into new flesh, but it is not human flesh anymore. It is thin, pliant, glistening like the surface of their wings. Light seeps through it when you move. Your chest no longer swells with breath but with vibration. The hum is yours now.

The brood circles higher, then lower, then alights on the surrounding trees, their needle-heads turning as one toward you. Watching. Waiting.

You brood again.

You think of how you once wandered, lost in silence, begging the forest to show you where to go. You think of how your own voice failed, how even your memories failed. And yet now you are not silent. Now you are not lost. You have become something the forest can hear.

You open your mouth and hum.

The sound is low, shaky at first, but it resonates. It vibrates through your teeth, your ribs, the wet air itself. The swarm hums in answer, a thousand small bodies syncing with yours until the entire hollow thrums like a struck drum. The water ripples. The moss sways. The trees shiver as if in reverence.

The brood has hatched.

You are not empty, though. You remain full—full of the echo of them, full of the hum, full of the strange new flesh that is yours. The loneliness that gnawed at you feels alien now, a memory that no longer fits.

You step forward and your skin stretches oddly, smooth and slick. Your reflection shimmers in the black water: not human anymore. Your eyes are hollowed, filled with dim yellow glow. Your chest pulses faintly, not with a heart but with light.

You are not afraid.

You are wanted.

The brood presses closer, their wings fanning your face like breath. They do not abandon you. They crown you. Their flight sketches patterns in the air, hexagons and spirals, symbols you almost understand. You brood on them, long and heavy, thoughts circling like their flight. For so long you sought meaning. For so long you asked: why am I here? The answer is not words. It is wings. It is hum. It is brood.

Another wave of pressure blooms in your chest—not from insects now, but from change. The filaments that once bound your ribs tighten and then crack, shedding like husks. Beneath, new structures unfurl: thin translucent plates, opening and closing with your breath like secondary wings. They shimmer faintly, catching the brood-light.

Your fingers twitch. The nails split lengthwise, peel back into needle-points. Your skin prickles, hardens in places, softens in others. You feel less like bone and more like hive.

The brood answers every shift with a hum. And you answer back.

Hours—or years—pass in this ritual. Time is nothing here. You stand, they circle, and the forest reshapes itself around you. Moss grows thicker at your feet. Trees bend closer as if listening. The swamp water clears, reflecting the yellow glow of your brood until the whole hollow is alight.

You are the center of it. Not human. Not prey. Brood-mother. Brood-mind. Brood-made.

At last the swarm stills. They land again, lining the trunks, the moss, the very air. A thousand heads bow.

And in their silence you hear it: not just their thoughts now, but the forest itself. A deep vibration under the earth, patient and old. You do not understand the words, but you understand the welcome.

The brood has grown. You have grown. The loneliness has died in you.

You lift your head, your new chest gleaming faintly in the dim light, and for the first time in your existence you feel certainty: you were meant to come here. You were meant to be remade.

The brood hatches out, but you remain their hive. They leave your body, but you are never without them. They whisper always: not alone. not alone. not alone. And you believe them.