On the Emotions of Thralls

For a mortal enthralled to a chrylurk's will, one's mind is not one's own. Trivial wisdom, oft quoted. But for all its overpreached banality, few have reckoned with what this truly means. Chrylurk subjugation is no less than a challenge --- a refutation, an annihilation --- of the human condition. Beyond human! Subjectivity itself ought experience a profound vertigo in the face of the thralls. The kiss of the chrylurk distorts and stains. To be infected --- inflected --- by that is to utter an alien word on the common tongue --- what one speaks can no longer be wholly one's native language. Poets have waxed with lyrical abandon, inspired or horrified by the beatific smiles and dilated pupils. Bewitched, mesmerized, hypnotized they are! The chrylurk is a siren, a temptress, a slither-tongued liar. Awe and lust are the words all are fain to use, but hardly do they understand. Philosophers ruminate in more sober words, diagnosing victims as perhaps suffering an abject weakness of the will --- no less culpable or pitable than drug-addled begging for more. This, perhaps, may be the truest words yet spoken on the matter. What is a drug, but a foreign body? Some substance the body could not, would not, produce on its own, whose effects send the patient into a state by efforts of a metabolism strained astray? We have digressed for long enough. The subject at hand is the thrall's subjectivity, and we contend that it is a poor understanding indeed which fails to grapple with its revelations. And it is a revelation --- just as a devout on the altar receives new lore from the divine, not merely known facts nor permutations of the mundane. What does a thrall feel? Remain no longer in this suspense: we contend a thrall bears a mind made anew. Enthrallment is a transfiguration of the the heart, and it stirs and aches to a new logic. Is a thrall in love with the chrylurk? Is this one sad when left drained and alone? Is that one happy to forsake their mortal origin? Fools would speak an affirmative. Here, we shall, with the light touch of an outline, categorize observations and reports. So as not to predispose our findings, each emotion shall be assigned an anonymous numeral, rather than given some misleading analogy to human experience. Consider these notes for further research. State-I is aversive. This is the pain known to all who contract ovirexia. Thus, the malaise is in part an immune response, a deliberate irritation of the sinuses, a purging of the gut. Yet it is not some pathless pit of despair. It is (the victim soon realizes) a state of acute craving. One aches in hunger and one feels very tense. When the chrylurk's parasitic brood is nourished, this stress wanes. When one smells the musk of their ravager (or even an old scent-marking) one feels at ease. State-II is slowly-building, conditioned. Above all, it is defined by a heightened awareness. The chrylurk becomes a fixation. An object of cathexis. Too easily, one presumes this to be the "love" a thrall feels for their captor --- not so. S-II is quite compatible with disgust and anxiety. Where in S-I the host attend to their parasite's needs, here their own desires arise once more. They want, whether it's more time held in the chrylurk's supernumary limbs, with hissed acknoledgment, or to get away, flailing and striking and harming that monster. State-III is arousal, sharp and fleeting. Arousal in the clinical sense: stimulation and exciment. Sexual readiness may be present, but irrelevant. The heart beats a pulse rapid, and veins dilate, blood surging warmly to the skin's surface, a blush extended even down the the neck. If S-I may mean comfort in the presence of the chrylurk, and S-II may mean interest, S-III is the desperate need, the whine in the throat, the pawing hands. But each state is paradox --- because S-III also mixes colors from the fear response's palate. Trembling, mindless terror --- perhaps because chrylurks find startled prey so easily herded, so pliable to threats. Special mention it to be made of a substate, (S-IIIb perhaps?): it occurs when the puppy's whine summons master's attention, when the predator catches the prey. The chrylurk feeds, that needle-toothed proboscis draining blood. Chrylurks make a habit of injecting prey, dosing it with venom, but here the fangs serve the dual function of pumping fluid back into the veins to replace the stolen volume. This is not a primer on chrylurk biology, so what matters is how it feels, and it is waves of drugged ecstasy and gushing relief. III is a state of being overfull, brimming with too much energy that demands venting, and its substate is nothing less than the perfect outlet. One falls into the light-headed weakness of blood-loss like a drunkard into wine's embrace. The needy thrall itches so terribly --- and whatever pain the chrylurk inflicts upon the body in the process of administering this seems to scratch in so welcome a fashion. State-IV is depressive. The come-down from the fever of a bite-begging thrall. In perhaps a grand irony or perversion, this dark stupor is the most similar to unaltered human psychology. There is no undue attraction to chrylurk scents and sensation. There is no pleading for a new venom-dose. There is no obsession with the chrylurk, save what dwells in the host's private memory. Those same memories haunt one in the throes of this state. Words spoken in drugged delirium stand in a sober light. Every thing the chrylurk has done is remembered, salient as to a dreamer past the threshold. How does one reconcile or cope? Shall the thrall fall deeper into chrylurk's grasp, or resist and remain torn in two by the inconstancy? This is also the most physiological state. The thrall is recovering from blood loss; and their brain suffers withdrawal from the chrylurk's most potent venoms. It's worth remarking as to how thralls are able to have such rich emotional spectrum, seemingly invented whole-cloth by this disease. It's the venom, of course --- such prolonged dose, so regularly, overpowers the endocrine system. Hormones and neurochemical are catalyzed and synthesized by the body metabolizing chrylurk toxins. Test the blood of a thrall rescued from months, years in a chrylurk's care, and it will sit nowhere in the range of healthy human results. State-V is another borderline disordered state. It may be acute or subtle, it may be conscious or repressed, but it is inevitable. After so long exposed to the power and potency of chrylurk anatomy, after bearing its wriggling larvae within oneself, the disparity grows stark. The host is not a chrylurk. And yet, nor is the host is the host human, or djramul, or freemouse, or whatever race they once hailed from. What human thinks these thoughts, feels these feelings? The larvae are capable of fusomorphosis, replacement-mimicry of their hosts' own body. They are infested and transforming --- if only by the brute alchemy of a the chrylurk's claws and fangs and tight, tight silk bindings. When was the last time they even wore clothes? Suffice it to say, when caught between worlds like this, the thrall is afflicted by a keen dysphoria. Their body is wrong. Their voice is wrong. The way others speak to the name --- is it the name, the titles, the pronouns? The clear disgust? They need to assert an identity, to cling to something. But again, the paradox --- because a thrall who advances to this state may be enamored with their chrylurk, lustfully envious of the insectoid angles, or they may be kicking and screaming through this hell, and grasping for any proof they are still human, that there's any hope of remaining --- returning to --- whom they were. State-VI is (so far!) the last woe we have seen fit to classify. As befits its postponed finality, it's the most difficult to grapple with --- so uncommonly seen among the thralls we have rescued and studied. Breaking with pattern of the last two, this is a mood of positive affect. It is not the fresh and crushing infatuation of the thrall's first brush with S-II; it is not the lurid thrill of giving onself over completely to one's mistress in the throes of S-III. This is the joy of devoutly serving. Waking each day secure by faith the chrylurk will provide, feeling the pride at seeing one's larvae grow and change oneself, giving a vindicative, sadistic smile when one sees Mistress has captured a new sister --- yes, the thrall does more than endure or plead, this one helps condition and control others. Oh, rejoice, and moan in satisfaction, knowing this will never end. Knowing this will never end. Here lies the backwards edge: Stirring from the fugue paralyzed by the fear the chrylurk will give next what one is choiceless to refuse, feeling suffocated by a body that never settles --- not ever alone, policed by the gut full of the worms loyal to one's captor --- and laughing despite oneself when one sees the bug has dragged in a new victim. At least now its attention will be split --- at least now one gets to exercise a bit of power over something. (Oh, gods why --- oh, what crime merited this punishment!?) This is the horror of a body and mind that is one's own to suffer, but never one's to command. Such is the thrall's lot.