by Brant Danay
Once past the mountain range, Chariah directed the spaceship east, and momentarily caught the flash of color created by the Prismsword of Morpheus Rex. Chariah could smell the dreams of his enemy from afar, and as he breathed in their mixture of perfume and decay, the very dreams of the Oneirophage from the night before played in his brain. He watched in his mind's eye as the Oneirophage metamorphosed into Satan, as the Oneirophage swam through oceans of blood inhabited by crimson mermaids, hypnotized by the slow drum of a giant, beating heart. He hissed as he watched the Oneirophage divining from the oracle of his own exposed brain, with a sensation that was somewhat like being in a hall of broken mirrors, reflecting endlessly into infinity. He snarled and flexed his claws as he observed the Oneirophage's desire for Mother Chaos, the wet dreams wherein he raped Chariah's soulmate.
Detaching himself from the umbilical cords as the Omnibeast landed, Chariah left the cockpit and made his way through the labyrinth of his vessel. A few minutes later, the jaws of the Overdragon opened, raised by umbilical cords which served as prosthetic muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Its fangs raised up like a portcullis, and its bloated tongue emerged into the daylight, salivating onto the ground far below. Moments later, the dark figure of the Necrodelic emerged from the corridor like throat to stand within the dripping maw, his long, black hair streaming behind him, his sculptured musculature silhouetted by dragon fangs and surrounded by clouds of sulfurous smoke.
"Drakhus," he spoke. The dragon's tongue elongated and lowered its master to the ground several hundred feet below.
The Necrodelic stood as dark, as silent, and as still as outer space, making his descent with stoic evil. His long hair billowed like wings behind him, fluttering and hovering on the downward breezes. As he stepped onto the surface of Grystiawa, the soul of the planet shuddered beneath him like a submissive bitch. With Hell in his eyes, Chariah gazed across the blood-red badlands, his enlightened demonsight drinking in every detail of the new battlefield for thousands of miles around.
The Necrodelic focused his crimson eyes upon his prey. His demonsight isolated Morpheus Rex several miles in the distance, hunting beyond the horizon, stalking the badlands beside the mountain ranges. Chariah watched as Morpheus Rex battled, subdued, and captured a Grystiawan demon. He observed the Dreaming Predator's strengths and weaknesses, his fighting techniques and tendencies. For one eternal moment, the Necrodelic spied upon Morpheus Rex the same way Satan spied upon the universe: from beyond. Then, in one timeless instant, from twenty miles away, the Necrodelic gazed directly into Morpheus Rex's eyes.
The Dreaming Predator felt the Necrodelic's flaming eye contact long before he saw it. It was like being telepathically abacinated. When he raised his eyes to meet the Necrodelic's, two infrared beams formed across the crimson wastelands, locking the two warriors together with eye contact as tangible as fire, eye contact that pierced like branding irons, the eye contact of dark soulmates destined to do battle.
The infrared eye contact would draw the Necrodelic across the vast expanses of maroon desert to combat Morpheus Rex. Chariah could no more unlock his unblinking gaze than he could gouge his own eyeballs out. Morpheus Rex's eyes had likewise been impaled, as surely as if red-hot spikes had been driven through them, and they held him just as motionless. With hot blood running down his face, he watched the Necrodelic come. The infrared beams grew shorter as the Necrodelic approached. The last several seconds, Chariah strode with the purpose of a panther, then came to a catlike stop a mere foot from his prey. His black claws glinted, his dark muscles rippled. These were his only weapons, but they were among the deadliest in the universe. His only armor was his skin, his physique, and his indomitable threshold for pain. The Necrodelic fought naked, for he was practically immortal, and pain did not disturb him. The flesh-smoking demon palpably radiated necromancy. An infinity of lethal spells were stored within his charred brain and scorched soul. His sorceries were as deadly as his claws, and as cruel as Satan himself.
Morpheus Rex raised his Prismsword and Spectrumhammer, reflecting the infrared eye contact across the badlands like the veins and arteries of Grystiawa's sunsets. Morpheus Rex gazed upon the Necrodelic with bloody-rimmed eyes, thousands of colors flashing inside them every second, like prisms spinning beneath a solar flare. The crimson tattoos of beating hearts began to pulse more rapidly around them.
"I've been dreaming of you", Morpheus Rex spake, his susurrating voice the hiss of a serpent, his three forked tongues flickering in and out of his mouth. "I've been dreaming of you every night. I've been dreaming of you making love to Mother Chaos. Dreaming of your extinctions of entire species, your genocides of entire races, your detonations of entire solar systems. I've been dreaming of your Bloodbong, your spaceship, your necromancy. Soon, I will be eating your dreams and drinking your blood. Soon, I will be haunted by your ghost in my bedchambers. When I sleep, I will dream your dreams, grow wet with your fantasies, and scream from your nightmares. After tonight, Necrodelic, you shall dream nevermore."
Chariah watched Morpheus Rex's three forked tongues slither back and forth. They darted in and out of his rainbow lips while he spoke in the sibilant language of serpentkind. Morpheus Rex rose up and swayed like a cobra while he talked of dreams and threatened death. Like a cobra he paused, and then, like a cobra, he struck, Prismsword curving through the air in a rainbow arch aimed for the Necrodelic's neck.
Sparks flew as Chariah deflected the blow, and then, with razor-sharp claws pressed against razor-sharp blade, Chariah leaned in close to Morpheus Rex's tattooed face, bared his fangs, and snarled, "You'll be dreaming in Hell tonight."
Their eye contact materialized again in crimson laser beams and became increasingly warm after Chariah's black promise, growing hotter and hotter as the Necrodelic's eyes blazed with successively deeper and deeper shades of red. Morpheus Rex's eyes were welded once more to the Necrodelic's stare like cauterized flesh. His eyelids were immoveable, adhered like roasted skin to lenses and sockets alike. Sparks began to fill the air between them, and then the fires of Hell came roaring through Chariah's soul, through his glowing crimson eyes which had been forged in those very fires, and then the space between them exploded.
Flames reached a thousand feet into the skies, thunder shook the ground and air, and the explosion of Hellfire threw the Dreaming Predator a mile into the distance. Chariah stood peacefully amidst the roaring fire and black smoke, calm and serene in his natural environment, a pleasant rush of pyromania flowing through his body.
The same glowing eyes which had brought Hellfire to Grystiawa watched with calculating observation as Morpheus Rex was blown backwards through the red-hot air and into the distant wastelands. Seconds later, Morpheus Rex landed on his feet in a battle stance, with Prismsword at a diagonal angle before him and Spectrumhammer held aloft over his head. Chariah did not hesitate, but charged at once from the wall of fire which surrounded him. One demonic leap landed him nearly atop the stunned Morpheus Rex, though he came down with the Rainbowspear firmly impaled through his thigh. He had barely twisted enough, at the apex of his flight, to avoid being castrated in mid-air.
Black claws slashed four lines of blood across Morpheus Rex's face as the Necrodelic dropped like a bird of prey from the skies, one from ear to chin, one from cheekbone to jaw, one from temple to upper lip, and one from brow to nose. The four long wounds gushed immediately, leaving Morpheus Rex awash in his own blood. The Necrodelic pulled the Rainbowspear out of his thigh and hurled it over the horizon.
Morpheus Rex licked the blood matting in his prism-plaited beard with his three tongues. As he moved his mouth, Chariah peered through the hole that had been torn in the Dreaming Predator's cheek. Just before it was once again obscured by blood and hanging flaps of skin, the opening briefly revealed the inside of Morpheus Rex's mouth. Within, the Necrodelic glimpsed the glistening of just-summoned venom on the tips of his fangs, like dripping hypodermic needles connected to syringes full of liquid cyanide.
Eve
n though Chariah saw the poison drip from Morpheus Rex's fangs before he opened his mouth, he was still barely able to avoid the cobra strike. Morpheus Rex's fangs closed upon air as Chariah sidestepped his attack. Droplets of venom spattered the sands like raindrops, where they would continue to sizzle for hours afterward.
Chariah backslashed his claws across Morpheus Rex's exposed throat. One claw severed his jugular vein, the other his carotid artery. The third clove his esophagus in half. The fourth ruptured his larynx. The blow would have decapitated a lesser demon. It would have decapitated ten lesser demons standing in an executioner's row. Morpheus Rex, however, was a highly evolved and enlightened demon, and could not be destroyed so easily.
As Morpheus Rex staggered backwards, blood pouring down his chest from his ruined throat, and jetting outward in streams from his mutilated jugular vein and carotid artery, the Necrodelic leaped towards him, his right arm extended over his head to deliver another blow. Morpheus Rex raised the Prismsword, tilting it towards the sun so that it reflected a multitude of colored beams at the Necrodelic. The strings of color tangled with the demon's long talons, stopping them in mid-air. A second later, Morpheus Rex pulled Chariah towards him with a jerk of the blade, and the crushing weight of the Spectrumhammer met the Necrodelic halfway, shattering his ribcage and sternum and slamming him to the ground.
Chariah rose with black ribs protruding jaggedly from his side, their ebony edges tipped with crimson. The claws of his right hand were still caught in the rainbow webbing of the Prismsword. He countered by sinking his fangs into the side of Morpheus Rex's skull.
The dream-eater tried to swing his Spectrumhammer again, but their close quarters prevented it. Morpheus Rex unleashed his serpentine powers of hypnotism instead, his prism eyes transforming into kaleidoscopes that paralyzed Chariah's eyeballs within their very sockets and momentarily halted his every thought process. Within that instant, Morpheus Rex struck again, burying his fangs in the Necrodelic's neck, even as the Necrodelic's fangs remained lodged in his own skull.
Venom coursed into the Necrodelic's carotid artery. The poison burned, but the Necrodelic seemed immune to its pain. Its paralyzing chemicals also seemed ineffective. Enraged, Morpheus Rex drove his fangs even deeper into the side of Chariah's neck, into his throat, injecting yet more venom into his bloodstream. Chariah pulled his fangs from Morpheus Rex's head and swung his right hand, claws still entangled with the Prismsword, in a sweeping arc through the air. The strength of his massive biceps and triceps carried Morpheus Rex through the air with them, unsheathing his fangs from his throat, breaking the rainbow strands of color around his talons, and flinging the dream-eater far into the distance, to land with bonebreaking force amidst the now flickering-out fires raised by Chariah's pyromancy.
Chariah caught his breath and refocused upon his enemy, prepared to attack again, but Morpheus Rex was already halfway across the desert, and an instant later, had completely disappeared. Chariah raked his demonsight across the planet, but could find no trace of the dream-eater. Neither his sense of smell, his echolocation, nor his psychic powers could determine where the Dreaming Predator had gone. He had obviously cast some sort of spell with his oneiromancy to prevent the Necrodelic from tracking him.
The Necrodelic's pectoral muscles heaved up and down as he struggled to breathe with broken ribs. A winged spider briefly attacked him. Chariah slashed his claws in a glittering black blur through the air, and the flying arachnid fell to the ground in four oozing, spasming pieces. Silently, Chariah turned and walked back to his ship. Directly behind him, the crimson sun Tyterviax was setting in a brilliant bloodbath to rival the one it had just witnessed, and Chariah's imposing silhouette stood black as night and deepest outer space before its vermilion corona. Casting long obsidian shadows which were not quite as dark as his flesh, the Necrodelic strode away from the setting sun, his silhouette growing larger while the red sun behind it grew smaller.
He returned to the Omnibeast and entered his bestial lair after once again whispering "Drakhus". Minutes later, the Omnibeast rose into the air and soared away. The night, which was another of Chariah's natural habitats, had just begun, and so too had his battle with Morpheus Rex, the Oneirophage.
4
Leaving a sigmoid trail of blood in his wake, the Oneirophage dragged his wounded body through Phantasmagorika. Torn flaps of snakeskin dangled from his face and chest, and half-clotted scabs obscured his elaborate tattoos. Just navigating the mazes and slithering up the rampways of his palace was excruciating, the injuries he had suffered in combat against the Necrodelic alive with pain. Though Morpheus Rex had desired to continue his battle with the Death Addict, the were-mechanisms in his brain had been triggered by sunset, rendering him a zombie and hypnotically forcing him back to his lair with a primal force as irresistible as gravity.
He briefly visited his weapons gallery and hung the Prismsword and Spectrumhammer on their racks. The Rainbowspear had been summoned back to his open hand as he made his retreat and, like an obedient familiar, had launched itself from whatever unknown region of Grystiawa it had been flung to by the Necrodelic and flown like a heat-seeking missile to its master. He placed it upon the weapons rack with its two brothers, then headed for his bedchamber.
Once inside his nocturnal sanctum, he hissed a serpent mantra, and a pile of flesh tumbled from the Darkprism to the floor, writhing like a mating ball, legs and arms protruding from the living heap at strange angles. The chains and shackles dangling limply along the southwest wall automatically shot out with the celerity of amphetamine-saturated cobras. They straightened in mid-air and quickly cuffed and fettered the captives, roughly disentangling the mass of bodies while simultaneously dragging them across the floor.
The Oneirophage bound his victims to the Amputator, then lurched to the wheel of the limbing machine. While dismembering his victims, he assessed his injuries. He was halfway decapitated, his head bobbing on slashed tendons and ligaments as though he were floating underwater. His face had four deep gashes, slanting diagonally from his left temple to his right mandible. One of his forked tongues was flickering through a hole in his cheek. The right side of his head had been partially chewed off. He had too many burns and broken bones to count, and he was losing blood at a violent velocity.
The Amputator finished its work, and the Oneirophage flung his limbless prey onto his bed. Twirling the Umbilicus in his long-nailed hands, he rearranged the sorcerous apparatus into a ten-tipped straw, nine to be inserted into his victims and one to be suckled like a teat by his torn mouth. The nine bottom tips of the straws were plunged simultaneously into the nine chests of the demon amputees, driving directly between their ribs and into their hearts. The Oneirophage immediately began to suck, imbibing the blood of all nine at once, swallowing greedily like a hedonist swallows wine, to replenish the copious amounts of plasma that had been lost.
The heartbeats of the doomed ennead quickened with terror and pain, causing their collective vitality to pump more rapidly through the Umbilicus, aiding the Oneirophage's voracious consumption. Excruciatingly impaled through the hearts, their chests became empurpled with internal hemorrhaging. Strings of tiny air bubbles surged through the Umbilicus. Its tips puckered the perimeters of skin at the insertion points, raising large, circular, pinkish welts upon the breasts of those it skewered. As their lifeblood was being drained directly from their hearts, their veins and arteries excruciatingly dried out and shriveled up. Heartbeats began to slow, running out of blood to pump, atria and ventricles grinding painfully against one another like crepitating bones, the periods between systole and diastole growing exponentially longer with each pulsation. Heart attacks went off like bombs, one after another, a chain reaction, exploding in the pain-swollen teats of the females and further splintering the cracked ribs of the males. Their force caused the Umbilicus to become slightly dislodged, and spinning jets of blood spattered the walls and ceilings with spiral galaxies of red dwarfs.
All the while, the On
eirophage began to heal, drinking blood like a vampire and gradually mixing in dreams as he grew stronger. A kaleidoscope of images were already flashing through his brain, and he relaxed as his oneiromantic drugs assuaged his suffering. He looked on with drugged fascination while his ninefold prey suffered their successive heart attacks. In his ensorcelled mind the hearts exploded in slow-motion. They looked and sounded like roses blossoming, and the spraying blood was as beautiful as summer rain.
The Oneirophage closed his spinning eyes and dreamed of hydras sprouting new heads every time they were decapitated. He dreamed of the hymens of a ravished succubus regrowing in her thirteen vaginas. He dreamed of lizard demons losing their tails in battle, and growing them back, then being castrated by their lovers, and growing their genitals back. He dreamed of phoenixes eating entire gardens full of drugs, overdosing to the point of neurological annihilation, then regenerating new brain cells and nervous systems. He dreamed of the Plaguepossessor, coming to eat his diseases and suffering. He relived his every crucible in the living, interdimensional gauntlets of the Reincarnatron and the Reincarnatrix, the churning, grinding torture-mazes which were the apotheosis of the samsaric cycle, the labyrinthine paths of rebirth that he had traversed a billion times. He dreamed of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa and freeing his soul from the endless circle of life, death, and rebirth. Then, finally, the Oneirophage slept.
*
The Oneirophage awoke at midnight, the deep wounds in his flesh still burning and dripping pus. Many had adhered to the sheets and blankets of his bed while he slumbered. The corpses of the night's nine victims were strewn all around him, the Umbilicus still stuck in their shriveled hearts like the nine-way catheter of a voluntary sacrifice, an autobloodletter, a hemagogue addict, or a hematophiliac onanist. Bloodless husks, pale and limbed, they looked like gargantuan grubs with death's heads. Still weak, the Oneirophage withdrew the Umbilicus from their lifeless chests, rearranged it, and drank the cold dreams from their curdled brains. He drifted once more into slumber, still suckling upon the mouthpiece held loosely between his lips, its nine tips now driven through an eyeball, a nose, a mouth, an ear, a suture, a fontanel, a penis, a vagina, and a rectum.