The ropes held Zecora fast as she slipped deeper into the gullet of the snake, her hooves pressed up against a ring of flesh before it gave way and she was squeezed and forced by the walls of muscle and bone that encased her into a tube-like chamber, smaller than she was around but that stretched tightly to fit her. A noxious scent hit her nostrils and a tingling wetness encircled around the mare, viscous liquid squeezed around her form, filling every nook and cranny and matting her fur and mane. She held her eyes tightly shut, her grunts and struggled muffled but visible from outside the snake.

She felt movement of the snake, contracting and pulling muscles as it slowly slithered away from where it had found her, seeking out a sheltered place to sleep and digest its massive meal.

The liquid tingled as the snake moved, building up more steadily into a sting, acid like sensation that permeated her being, seeping around her and eating away at her fur. She hadn’t suffocated yet, minutes now since she had been able to draw a breath… some strange magic was keeping her alive in the belly of the snake. The tingling and stinging ever stronger around her as her movements and struggles became more and more labored.

Minutes passed into hours, trapped in the depths of the snake, her mind fading in and out of consciousness as a numbness spread over her, body dissolving away into mush. She couldn’t move an inch now if she tried. The snake had been still awhile now, muscles churning the liquefying zebra within its stomach every hour or so, beginning to absorb her away.

Zecora’s mind wandered to and fro, finding it harder and harder to focus as time progressed… how much time, she couldn’t tell. Hours, days… the stinging had faded away, unable to feel any part of her body now, completely blind and deaf with no link to anything beyond her new little world inside the snake. Her mind comes to, as a new sensation crosses what’s left of her being, a tingling, almost like her consciousness was being drawn away from the stomach, held elsewhere, her sense of touch returning.

She felt… she felt cool rocks beneath her, as if she were suddenly outside of the beast once more! And yet… she could see nothing, hear nothing, and she lay paralyzed, unable to move. A jolt surges through her, some strange command forcing her to move, though in an alien motion- she stretched forward, only to be pulled back, entirely against her will, feeling the stone beneath slide as she- no… as the snake slithered. The jolt continued, she couldn’t think at all for herself as it persisted, stretch, contract, stretch, contract, over and over, it was all she could do!

As quickly as it began it stopped… her mind able to focus again, as it slowly dawned upon her just what had happened. The creature had absorbed her, somehow, the magic taking her consciousness and fusing it with the very muscles of the snake, her own mass serving to help it grow larger. She’d become a part of it, a sentient set of muscle within the girth of the great python… trapped, she realized, with no sense except touch and the electrical pulses from the creature’s faraway brain.

Trapped permanently… and no end in sight.

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