A Serpentine Tail

asked for an origin story for his snaky goddess Saris, so here you have it: a tale of how Dr. Sarah T. E. Spenser, archaeologist, metamorphosed into the last, best hope of an extinct serpentine civilization. The artwork is from , and though the originals have never been posted, you can see them in ' gallery starting here.

If you'd like a story commission of your own, the details and terms are here.

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A Serpentine Tail

"Out of all the archaeology fieldwork assignments, we pulled Indiana Jane," Victor, postgraduate student in archaeology, huffed. His features were coated with sweat and grime accumulated during an 8-hour trek through the mountains of Nuevo Rico.

"Yeah," his compatriot Martin wheezed. Their soft college-spoiled back were buckling under the weight of the backs both carried, with enough supplies to last a few days on the forested slopes of the Sierra Culebra range. "We could be dusting Etruscan ruins in Milan with Forrestal, but noooo. We drew the one that busts our humps looking for lost cities and fortune and glory."

Ahead of them, the object of their derision stopped in her tracks. "It's not about fortune and glory," she said. "It's about filling in the gaps of what we know and finding the truth behind the legends." Sarah T. E. Spenser's red ponytail bobbed as she looked back at her graduate students, blue eyes shining from her pale, delicate features (if also grime-streaked). Despite her slight frame, she carried weight equal to the two grousers behind her and if she looked a bit like an Indiana Jones cosplayer it was because she had dressed more sensibly than they in breathable khaki rather than hipster denim.

"Don't people normally get porters to help with the heavy lifting," said Martin in response, sweat beading on his brows, "when they're finding the truth behind the legends?"

"Often they do," said Sarah. "Of course, since this legend is that of a society of snake-worshiping cannibal sorcerers, none of the villagers in the valley were willing to be hired as porters."

Victor's flushed cheeks drained of their color at the mention of snake-worshipping cannibal sorcerers. "That's horrible!"

"Isn't it, though?" Sarah, shaking her head sadly at the thought of all the discoveries the villagers were denying themselves through superstition. "But that's just the kind of sad ignorant darkness that this expedition is seeking to illuminate with the light of truth."

"S-snake-worshipping cannibal sorcerers?" Martin cried, taking a little longer to process the information than his compatriot. "Why did it have to be snake-worshipping cannibal sorcerers?" he added, thinking longingly of unearthing Etruscan vases with Forrestal in Milan.

"It was all in the packets I gave you before we left," Sarah replied. "Didn't you read them? I spent hours condensing my research."

Martin and Victor looked at each other silently.

"Didn't you wonder why it was me in the Land Rover instead of someone that knows the mountain better?" cried Sarah. "Someone who wouldn't have wrapped it around a tree?"

Her assistants simply stared blankly in response.

"Anyway, a German expedition reported seeing a structure in the saddle between this peak and the next one in 1913," said Sarah. "They didn't have a chance to follow up with it because of the war, but it's marked on their map as  Elfenbeineidechsenstadt." She paused, took another glance at the blank stared behind her, and added: "Ivory Lizard City. That plus some vague Spanish and Portuguese records make this the best lead we've got."

"The same keen instincts that helped her rediscover the lost rubber plantations of Jaritataca for months of excavating stone tools used for making latex," Victor muttered under his breath.

"Or the shattered statue shards of Kieszeń-Potwór in the Ryukyus," added Martin, shuddering at the thought of his fellows spending months in the Pacific jungles trying to collect them all.

"I admit as information goes it's a little sketchy," Sarah said, overhearing her muttering comrades and seeking to buoy their spirits with some additional truth. "I've been in more libraries than a San Francisco hobo researching, and the problem I keep coming up against is that the Ophidians were annihilated by the Chachapoyas, the Warriors of the Clouds."

"That sounds like the Ophidians' problem," gasped Martin, "not yours."

"Until you consider that the Chachapoyas were conquered by the Incas, and the Incas by the Spanish," Sarah continued. "Every bit of information we have, every scrap of detail—even the leads we're following right now—goes through two civilizations with no written records and a third that wasn't interested in oral traditions unless they led to more gold."

"So there's not even any gold, then?" Victor wailed. The promise of fortune and glory had been just about the only thing sustaining him, and one of the two just wasn't going to cut it.

"There isn't any in the legend," Sarah replied. "Let's see for sure."

They had been moving through increasingly difficult terrain, moving toward a densely wooded area—a cloud forest—and increasingly alternating conversation, whining about portage loads, and cutting through underbrush and dense foliage with the trail-worn machetes that Sarah had provided. There was no sign of any ruins, and indeed of any human habitation whatsoever aside from a scattering of rusty Coke cans with graphics from the 1950s, presumably chucked by cockpit jockeys from planes.

"Can we go back now?" Martin whined. "We've been out here for hours and there's not even a lost village, let alone a lost civilization."

Sarah's eyes were shining brightly in the light that made it through the cloud forest canopy. "We're close," she said. "I can feel it."

One more machete chop, and she proved herself right: the greenery fell away to reveal a carved pillar, white as an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood, in the form of a titanic serpent with teeth the size of cavalry sabers and slitted eyes big enough for a regulation game of gridiron football.

"THEY'RE GONNA EAT ME!" shrieked Martin. "AAAAHHHH!" Squealing like a little girl who had learned to associate volume of crying with volume of candy received, Martin cast down his pack and charged back the way they'd came.

"The trouble with him is the noise," Sarah said ruefully, watching him go and remembering how he'd shrieked during the Land Rover crash, on seeing what he thought was a snake but was actually a vine, and when a weird bug had landed on him.

"I suppose," said Victor, enviously listening to Martin's voice fade in the distance. Only the fact that he was made of slightly sterner stuff, and that he stood to lose all his summer archaeology credits, kept him by Sarah's side.

"I don't know what he was afraid of," Sarah continued, examining the pillar. "It appears to be a ritualized depiction of a hydrodynastes gigas, the giant water cobra."

"Are they…poisonous?" Victor squeaked, shuddering and wishing he had a mongoose.

"No, of course they're not poisonous." Sarah was examining the statue carefully. It was in a remarkable state of preservation; save for the foliage covering it, it might as well have been erected the day before or parachuted in with the Coke cans.

Victor let out a deep relieved breath.

"They're venomous," Sarah said, still examining the statue. "No snakes are poisonous unless you eat their venom glands." Running her hand over the material, she cooed slightly in surprise and anticipation. Whatever the statue had been carved of, it had a rough but fine texture not unlike ivory, and it was slightly warm to the touch—she could have sworn there was a momentary jolt of electricity, too.

"Is…is it really bad venom?" Victor pressed.

Sarah made some notes in her field journal and resolved to come back for some photographs. "No, it's very mild. People keep those snakes as pets."

Victor breathed another deep sigh.

"Then again, these carvings have the fangs in the front rather than in back like hydrodynastes gigas," Sarah continued. "It could be a species unknown to science, in which case all bets are off."

Victor looked longingly after the long-vanished Martin before following Sarah, who was pressing ahead aggressively, convinced that something big was nearby.

She was right; not a hundred yards from the statue, the foliage parted after some gentle coaxing with a machete to reveal a portal made of the same ivory material, flanked by a pair of very similar snake statues, their forked tongues and fangs lifted to the heavens. It was gigantic, cyclopean, easily ten feet tall and just as wide, with enormous steps leading down into a hollow that was mysteriously rather open and free of litter—not the usual state of ruins more than 1400 years old at the very least.

"Look at this," Sarah said, her voice quavering with excitement. "Look at the Ophidians' building practices! I don't even know what this stone could be, but look at how regularly shaped the blocks are, how smooth they are! This is totally different from the way the Incas and the Chachapoyas built! Do you have any idea, any idea at all, what this means?"

"Hopefully, it means we won't have to go down those steps," Victor whined.

"It means that not only do we have to go down them, Victor: it means that what's down there is a truth greater than anything I could have hoped for. An entirely unknown civilization, just as the legends said!"

Sarah immediately began clambering down the stairs, which were curiously wide and curiously steep, as if meant for people with much longer legs and much wider feet than its rediscoverers. She snapped on a flashlight as she went, but within a few feet it became clear that such wasn't necessary: the ruins were lit by diffuse light from above, seeping through carefully placed gaps in the masonry in such a way as to make them seem to almost glow from within.

Victor, following, looked nervously over the ruins' snake motif, which was omnipresent. Not just the stylized pillars, either; the stairs ended at a long passageway, and it was richly decorated with bas-reliefs that were set into the very stones. They depicted humanoids with clawed hands and feet, snake heads with enormous flared hoods, and tails much longer than their bodies that coiled and wound merrily across the intricate stonework. They were depicted as building great structures, playing games that seemed to involve catching balls with their hoods, soaking in great pools of water that looked almost like giant jacuzzis…

"What does all this mean, exactly?" Victor said.

"I don't know." Sarah was agape, walking a few steps ahead of Victor and running her hands over every bit of the reliefs in defiance of archaeological procedure as the pristine ivory snakes reflected in her eyes. She seemed to be gathering energy from the place, breathing in whatever strength had enabled it to endure in the same way that Victor was growing more timid and frightened. "But it looks like it's a pantheon of snake gods and goddesses. They're not doing the usual things gods do on these carvings—smitings and such—either. It looks like they're dedicating themselves to leisure. I wonder if that's why this ruins were build, as pleasure palaces for the Ophidians' gods…"

"Th-this one doesn't look like leisure to me," said Victor, gesturing at a series of panels depicting the same snake-people appearing to hunt down peccaries—which seemed minuscule compared to them—with spears and their bare claws and fangs.

"Sure it does. It's hunting—the leisure of choice for landed British aristocrats," said Sarah. "I bet that this is a ritualized depiction of the serpent gods intervening to bring about a successful hunt. Or perhaps the hunted animals are a sacrifice to them? It would explain some of the legends…"

Victor, hearing only "murder-cannibalism" when Sarah said "hunt," blanched. "How can you be sure those aren't people being hunted?" he asked in a quavering voice. "Can you read it? Maybe translate it?" Decades of bad adventure movies had built up that expectation in him, made more urgent by the hope that the "Indiana Jane" he had so recently derided would read that visitors to the temple were not cannibalized but instead richly rewarded with gold.

"Well...I can't," Sarah replied sadly. "There's no script here, which isn't surprising since we're so far away from the Maya who developed the only known writing system in the New World. There's only what we can gain from looking at it. See how there are no human figures, for instance? That shows that the Ophidians had the utmost reverence for their serpent-gods, maybe even to the point of having a taboo about depicting anything but them."

"Does...does that carving do anything to disprove the theories that the villagers had? You know, about the cannibalistic snake-people?"

"Of course it does," said Sarah. "I don't think that anyone who carved their pantheon so lovingly and was so dedicated to their leisure and happiness, could have been as bloodthirsty as the legends say."

Victor squirmed uneasily in the eerie light. "What do they say, exactly?"

"Oh, the usual xenophobic things that people say out of fear of the unknown and ignorance," said Sarah. She was still fixated on the joyful anthropoid serpents in the bas-reliefs, not even looking at her assistant as she spoke. "That the Ophidians worshiped horrible snake-gods that demanded human sacrifices, that they thought Chachapoyan babies were a particular delicacy, that they built towers to the heavens to try and overthrow all other gods, that they didn't smell good, that they didn't wear fashionable clothes."

Displaying a noticeable lack of mirth at the jokes Sarah had tacked onto her laundry list of serpentine horrors, Victor took a step back, as if distancing himself from the carved, static snake-people made him less likely to be sacrificed or eaten at short notice.

"Of course, that ties into a triumphal conquest narrative that's so common in cultures that eliminate what they don't understand," continued Sarah. "The brave Chachapoyan cloud warriors took a stand against the depredations of the Ophidians and their gods and stormed their lands, toppling their towers and defeating their venomous foes in heroic combat while casting their gods down to oblivion. I think there's definitely truth in that; you can see places here and here where it looks like somebody with a stone tool tried, and failed, to wreck this exquisite carving."

When it came to issues of cannibals and their snake-gods, Victor was fairly certain that he'd be on the side of those trying to chip every trace of them off the face of the planet. But he could tell that Sarah was enraptured by what she was seeing, and held his tongue--though there was no denying that he was having trouble doing the same for his bladder thanks to sheer cold-sweat terror at what she was describing.

Sarah ran her hand longingly over the carvings, the ivory-like structure making the nerve endings in her fingers crackle with energy and excitement in return. "So much information locked in here," she murmured. "So much truth. If only there were some way to get at it."

After a moment, Sarah shook her head to clear her thoughts, and Victor followed her bouncing red ponytail still deeper into the temple. There were myriad side passages, but the light seemed to grow stronger straight ahead, so Sarah pressed on in that direction. The bas-reliefs grew more complex, and the strange glow stronger, as they went. Both could soon swear that they could hear a low and gentle humming coming from the ivory.

Eventually, the pathway opened up into a vast central chamber. Other ivory passages radiated from it like spokes on a wheel, and in the center was a raised dais under a skylight. Bits of foliage from outside drooped over the edge, and droplets of water echoed as they hit the floor, but the clear blue Andean sky was visible above, and a shaft of pure sunlight shone down. The dais itself was ringed with a phalanx of serpent statues like the one that had sent Martin down the mountain, shrieking all the way home. Each glowed noticeably with the same dim ambient light that suffused the Ophidian temple, and they seemed to somehow collect and focus that light on the dais, strengthening the pool of sunshine that illuminated it.

In the center of the room, high on the dais and ringed by serpent statues, was a squat, richly carved column. Resting atop it was a fist-size gem, faceted, smoky and brilliant green. If it was an emerald, it was larger and more richly colored than any gem Sarah or Victor had ever seen.

"This is incredible," whispered Sarah. "What a discovery…the inner sanctum of the Ophidians' temple, just as it was when the Chachapoyans annihilated them. How astonishing that it's in such good shape!"

"How astonishing that it's even creepier in full sunlight," replied Victor.

"Don't you see?" Sarah said, her eyes catching the shaft of sunlight through the ivory skylight, rimmed with hanging foliage and the gentle spray of jungle mist from above. "This is the purest representation of the ancient Ophidians' religious practices. These snake pillars and that altar are clearly central to their worship of this pantheon of mythical serpents."

"Th-through plunging poisoned daggers into their abdomens, pr-probably," stuttered Victor. Every aspect of his being quaked from the mysterious, inhuman energy of the place--it debilitated him, and made him desperate to join Martin in his cowardly retreat.

That selfsame energy, though, suffusing the air and the luminous gem on the dais, seemed to be feeding Sarah's lust for knowledge and exploration, giving her strength even as it sapped Victor's away. She approached the altar, leaving her pack at its base and clambering up the too-large steps with a series of light and effortless hops. Victor followed, having a considerably more difficult time with the steps, but when he was within an arm's reach of the pillars he stopped, quaking.

"This place feels…wrong," he moaned, looking desperately from the exit behind him to the colossal cobras before him.

"On the contrary," said Sarah, up before the altar. The gem's vibrant color filled her eyes, the green mixing with her natural blue to produce what almost looked like two pools of amber in her pale and finely sculpted features. "This place feels…right."

Climbing up one more step, Victor's face also lit up with refracted light. But what he was confirmed his worst fears: stone serpents of sinister and cannibalistic shape, an unnerving light that was like none he had ever seen before issuing from the stone, and Sarah herself, seemingly more alive and vital than she'd ever been in the midst of it, totally blind to the horrors that were no doubt lurking nearby.

It was too much for Victor to take. Credit or no credit, he was getting out of there. "Y-you're on your own," he cried, stumbling backwards down the steps.

"What? said Sarah, still looking at the stone. "But we're so close! I can feel it, all the truths to put those silly legends to rest are right here in this room."

"You can keep your truths," wailed Victor, shaking like a leaf from the effects of whatever diabolical energy suffused that place. "I'm getting out of here, and you should too!"

"I can't…" Sarah murmured, still fixated on the great gem. "I can't. We're so close…"

Victor didn't wait for her to finish her reasoning. Abandoning the supplies he'd sweat for and complained mightily about hauling up the mountainside, he sprinted for the way he'd come in. Martin and the remains of the Land Rover were all he had to look forward to, assuming he could make it back through the rough patch of jungle without a machete.

Alone, Sarah thought carefully about her next move. It wasn't possible to survey the ruins properly with just one person, and the photography equipment was designed for a crew of three. Still, there were rubbings that could be taken, sketches that could be made, and other small things she could do to claim the epochal discovery she had made, to open it up to scholars the world over.

Sarah could do that; part of her even wanted to do that. But the strange energy of that place was focused on the spot where she was standing, and it had joined her natural curiosity in urging her to pick up the massive gem—to see if the treasure that would remake her career was really as incredible as it seemed to be.

Carefully, but in violation of everything she knew about archaeology, Sarah reached out and picked up the stone. It was shockingly light as she gingerly hefted it, a few ounces at most. Strangely, removing it from the shaft of light didn't dim its glow one whit. In fact, the glow only increased, brightening to the point that it was almost blinding. Sarah shielded her eyes, but the verdant supernova in her hand lasted only a moment before it dimmed.

And not just dimmed: the intense green light faded to black in her hand before cracking apart and crumbling to ash.

"Ohh," Sarah whispered. "What happened? Did it-"

She paused, cut off by a strange sensation. The hand that had held the gem—not more than a few motes of ash now—was trembling violently. Violent tremors weren't the end, either; suddenly Sarah's hand, her arm, her body…all was abuzz with an intense and slightly queasy prickling, not quite one sensation and not quite another.

"Wh-what's going on?" she said, confused. Her back had started to ache, spasms running up and down it like nerve impulses, revealing the firm midriff beneath her khaki shirt and jacket as her spine started to arch of its own accord.

Sarah's eyes widened at what came next.

Her hand had begun to tremble itself into a new shape. She stared as her colorless nails, pitted from fieldwork, were suddenly flooded with color, shading smoothly to an inky black. With each tremor, her nails also gained sharpness, gained length, and lost definition around the cuticle. At the same time, Sarah's fingers flexed of their own accord, stretching longer and swelling stronger. The back of her hand was suddenly dappled with a rich forest green, much like the gem had been. Only this green was no treasure, but rather tiny scales asserting themselves amid the otherwise human skin.

"What's happening to me?" Sarah choked. Her entire body was aquiver now, the sensations spreading out and growing exponentially across her body with each passing moment.

At the same time, she was suddenly overcome with a flood of just what she'd been seeking: truth.

Disorganized images flooded into Sarah's brain alongside information about her body's sudden metamorphosis. As she watched her other hand grow thick and clawed, Sarah was also privy to images she had never—could never—have seen before, a tidal wave washing over her consciousness.

She saw a verdant mountaintop, a paradise for snakes and all else that slithered and crawled through the mud…and among them, a race of particularly verdant green coloration, particularly large and impressive hoods. Their front fangs were envenomed, unlike the snakes that had endured into the modern world, and they appeared as nothing so much as great green cobras.

"I'm…I'm…ch-changing…" Sarah's fragile consciousness, rocked by what she was seeing and what she was feeling, reeled still further as the metamorphosis spread. Dapples of scales on her new clawed hands were suddenly all over her hands, her arms…soft as silk, softer even than the oily pink skin they had metamorphosed from. Rapidly spreading up her arms, Sarah gasped at the unexpectedness of the sensation of spreading snakeskin, growing green. Inside her boots, toes pressed sharply together, constrained from the free scaly growth her hands had experienced. The leather of Sarah's boots creaked as it was forced outward by feet rapidly swelling beyond their confines, by toenails that were darkening and pointing unseen.

In her mind's eye, Sarah saw a wellspring, a natural font of magic the likes of which was no longer seen in the world. The serpents gathered about it, in it, and over generations it had reshaped them much as she herself was now being reshaped. Soon they were enormous, far larger even than hydrodynastes gigas, the giant water cobras known to mankind in the latter days.

Stumbling on rebellious legs, Sarah reached out to a serpent column for support. Her claws easily tore through the ivory, leaving brutal marks, but she barely noticed. Her back was now forcing her forward, bowing her posture as her body pumped massive resources into a tiny lump that was beginning to emerge where her coccyx had once been. Within seconds, the new growth was forcing itself out as a lump in the back of Sarah's khaki pants, straining at the fabric much as her toes now chafed at the socks and boots binding them.

Most importantly, though, the surging changes brought with them a realization. Sarah had been shocked at first, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar signals coursing up and down her body. She had interpreted them at first as pain, but no. Even in the swelling and chafing of new limbs and old limbs reshaped, it wasn't pain.

It was pleasure.

"Yes…y-yes…oh yes…" the moans, soft at first, escaped by instinct as Sarah watched the serpents of her mind's eye change too. Legs and arms that had been shorn away by evolution regrew larger and stronger than ever under the influence of the magics of that wellspring. Tools appeared, crude at first, as did the first stirrings of magic in those ancient serpentine bodies: jumping sparks, roaring flames at a distance, soft glows for nighttime.

In the present, the glow was coming from all about as the beams of light that had once been focused on the crystal now channeled energy into Sarah herself.  The jumping sparks were the sensations of her old skin giving way to silk-smooth scale; the roaring flames were the intense pressure that had begun to build up at both ends, her head and her feet.

A boot exploded out the front, and then another, the glue and stitches holding them together parting with a series of wet snaps as newborn claws forced their way through sock and shoe. Long, strong toes, thickly scaled and darkly clawed, tore their way through even as they spasmed and curled with the intense, exotic sensation of their changing forms and the sudden freedom from confinement.

And Sarah's face? The intensity of the pressure—of the pleasure—had her squeezing her eyes shut as the bones of her skull were molded on the wheel of the Ophidians' energy. Ears shrank and shriveled, fading away in tiny bursts of ecstasy as they gave of their cartilage for more urgent matters. As they vanished, Sara's nose was widening, her nostrils flaring intently with each quavering breath. There was a blurring, a fusion, between nose and upper lip complete with the first sign of facial scales, and when Sarah opened her mouth, its changing structure meant that her jaws opened far wider than they could have, beneath what was no longer a nose but now a muzzle, a reptilian snout, in its early stages of development.

The energy kept coming, and so did the images. Sarah saw the nascent snakes giving for their venom and their magics to form block and mortar of incredible strength, astounding lightness, and ivory complexion.

Sarah's own ivory complexion was fading fast, as the last few patches of human flesh—the back of her neck, the base of her spine, her exposed midriff—were giving way fast. She had come to understand that with each wave of pleasure, each paroxysm of ecstasy, she was also growing taller and thicker. Her shirt  barely covered her breasts, much less her middle, and her elbows had already begun to shred through her shirt and jacket. Her khakis, made of sterner stuff, had so far restrained the roiling tail that the lump within them had become; it snaked back and forth, growing with each motion, as it attempted to find purchase, find a weakness. The sensation was like Sarah holding her breath just before the moment of release, a tightness and pain that somehow made suffused the whole with still more pleasure.

"Ahh...AHH!" Sarah cried. It wasn't just energy that was flowing through her slender form, reshaping her...there were images as well. So much information...so much knowledge...

She stumbled backwards, bumping up against another of the serpent pillars that had so terrified Victor, clutching at her chest. Sarah could feel her small, firm bosoms becoming less small, less firm, flowering outward with new growth. Her trembling fingers, with their newly sprouted claws, dug into the fabric of her outfit as the long-dormant and evolutionarily-suppressed limbs of the ancient serpents flowed through her. Sarah's dividing tongue lolled, her teeth audibly snapping around it as they took on hypodermic attributes, the now-useless molars sinking into oblivion amid her widening jaws..

The tail, covered with shimmering new scales, squeaky-clean and vaguely rubbery in their feeling as it rubbed against the scales of her body, continued to grow. Four feet long now and hungry for more, it had squirmed so thoroughly down its only escape route, the leg of Sarah's sensible trousers, that it had begun to peek, to protrude, from beneath the cuff near where her boots were still swelling with new growth of their own.

Images began to resolve again in Sarah's racing mind. Not a civilization of serpent-worshipers they...no...the Ophidians had been serpents themselves. She saw them with their venom-ivory, magical in its properties, building first small structures and then vast temples. She saw them administering an isolationist empire, shunning contact with the humans who had just begun to arrive in favor of developing their own peculiar gifts.

"Yesss…yesss…!" cried Sarah, spittle spilling over her sharpening fangs and changing gums. Pressing up against the ribbed surface of the snake pillar, Sarah raked herself over it, reveling in the sensation as her growing body pulled her clothes tight. Massive runs opened up in her shirt, green scales now shimmering beneath, as her growing bosoms pressed on it. The sturdy stitching on Sarah's boot tops came undone when confronted with feet still growing to support a creature that could comfortably use the cyclopean steps that poor human Sarah had not quite been able to master.

The long red hair that had long been Sarah's trademark was the next to go away. As she gyrated against the ancient ivory snake, first strands and then clumps of her mane began to drift down around her. Serpents had no hair, after all, and neither did the Ophidians; Sarah could feel each follicle on her body as it closed for good as a spark of white-hot release, intensified by swelling on her temples and back where what looked like a cobra's hood had begun to prickle itself to life.

Sarah's new tail wrapped and unwrapped itself around her leg in an ecstasy of growth and confinement. With parts bunched up near its base and at least a foot of scaly flesh protruding from her pant leg, it was now nearly as long as she was tall—and like her height, it was also still growing. Each time the tail writhed, each time its new muscles flexed, more runs and tears opened in Sarah's pants, pushing them steadily closer to ruin.

The ancient Ophidians…Sarah could see them hunting, soaking in great hot tubs fired by magic, sunning themselves in luxuriant temples. They had devoted themselves to leisure, to a life of pleasure and the mind…and it had lasted for centuries despite the whispers of the new arrivals, the humans, in the valleys below the cloud forests.

"Come on…come on…yesss…" Shivering with pleasure, Sarah felt as if her entire being burned with a slick, wet flame as her new frame burst her old clothes asunder. Her leather belt shrieked as the metal buckle was torn apart by broadening hips, thickening thighs. Her shoulders arched as buttons popped merrily from her shirt, revealing breasts far rounder and fuller than any human Sarah had ever sported. The scales all along the front of her metamorphosing form were of a different consistency than the others, exposed now for the first time as a soft and slightly ribbed blue.

By now, Sarah was much taller, wearing what remained of her outfit like a child might wear doll clothes. At nearly ten feet, she had almost topped out the serpent pillar when she reopened her eyes; the blue flashed to amber at the sudden input of light, and pupils adjusted themselves to slits amid tears of both irritation and joy. The tail, though…snakes were nearly all tail, and Sarah's new for was no exception. Bound by the confines of her pants, it had finally reached the point of no return…and there was a mighty shrrrp as the fabric finally gave way, tail exploding from trousers so violently that pieces of khaki were carried along for the ride before being flung to all corners of the dais. Free now, the tail squirmed merrily as the girth and length began to pile on in the absence of any restraint; it coiled about both Sarah and the statue as she continued to writhe against the latter.

Now, the visions were showing the Chachapoyans. Armed and girded for battle, with a horror of the Ophidians born of ignorance, they attacked without mercy. The Ophidians were formidable, with venomous fangs, powerful tails, and even more powerful magics, but…they refused to fight back. Such was their gracious nature that only a few scattered individuals of their number struck back.

Sarah lifted her snout to the sky. It had grown, and aside from a red hair or two clinging through static electricity, there was nothing human about its shape. The bands of flesh along either side were pulsating, inflating, and as Sarah spread her shoulders again to shred the remaining fabric clinging to them, her hood flared out to its true extent. Her tail, encouraged by the example, flared out as well in a final paroxysm of growth. At 12 feet, over twice the height she'd had as a weak pink human girl, Sarah now towered over the snake pillar…and her tail towered over her. Kneading and wrapping about the nearby stones with a mind of its own, and alight with the pleasurably sensation of just being, it was now easily over 20 feet long, double even Sarah's now increased height.

With the changes nearing their conclusion, the physical sensations were doing so as well. Sarah let out one last primal wail as they climaxed; waves of warm liquid happiness spurted over her from forked tongue to clawed toe to tailtip, and in her pleasurable writhing she ripped off the last little bits of human clothing. Where once a skinny redhead of an archaeologist had stood, a verdant serpentine goddess now reclined.

And with the last changes, a last revelation. The Ophidians, doomed, had thrown all their might into the temple in which Sarah now stood. It was a structure so gargantuan that it actually was the mountain, the jungle having swallowed up its base. It had been lovingly designed, even as the Chachapoyans had slaughtered its builders, to collect and curate their powers. Those powers had been scattered to the winds upon the civilization's death, but over millennia it had seeped back, crystallized on the altar, waiting for a suitable entity to come and absorb it—to give the Ophidians a chance to exist once more in a friendlier and more peaceful time.

Sarah was that entity, that vessel.

…Sarah? No. That was a human name, and she had changed, become so much more than human. The memories were still there, the sensations, but there were also a thousand years of Ophidian history and culture, and a new form whose every curve and scale radiated magic. A new form, a new being, a new goddess demanded a name that was more than only one of her constituent parts.

"Saris," the newborn goddess hissed with soft reverence, rolling the syllables around on her new tongue, in her new maw. "Yesss. I am Saris, I am reborn, and I will see this place restored to glory."

There was much to be done. Powers to test, a civilization to make anew, a temple to restore. But first…Saris smiled mischievously beneath her vast hood, her tail coiling eagerly about her ankles.

First, there were some rebellious graduate students to deal with.