by Brant Danay
Once finished, the Oneirophage twisted the Umbilicus back into a single straw and returned to his bedchambers. There was still an hour before dawn, and the Oneirophage had one more task to perform before metamorphosing into Morpheus Rex. He held the Darkprism aloft again, but this time reached into it himself with his right hand, digging around inside it for a few seconds before withdrawing the winged spider. He held it by one large hairy leg, its other legs kicking against his arm. With one quick motion the Oneirophage flung the giant wounded spider across the room. It bounced across the floor, its broken wings beating uselessly, before being grabbed by the sentient chains crawling from the walls. The exact shape of the Prismhammer was still retained by the gaping wound in its back, a cylindrical cistern full of blood both old and new. The chains dragged it belly first to the Amputator, where it was splayed and prostrated upon the surgical table.
The Oneirophage turned the wheel of the Amputator, and the chains bore the winged spider inexorably into the device's sadistic maw. The Oneirophage watched through the transparent crystal as four guillotine blades simultaneously fell, each severing two of the spider's legs. The hairy appendages thudded to the ground, twitching and writhing.
The Oneirophage turned the wheel backwards to bring the spider's wings into position, pulled an iron lever to tilt the surgical table vertically, and then the guillotines swung again and the severed wings flapped along the floor like manta rays in an oven.
Receiving the spider as its wounds were being cauterized, the Oneirophage carried it by the head to his bed. He tossed it onto the blankets like a war discus, then plunged the Umbilicus through its head and drank its dreams. For a brief while, the Oneirophage floated peacefully, dreaming of a spider succubus that stalked him, both sexually and predatorily. The dream quickly turned to nightmare, one from which he could not escape. When he awoke, he found that he remembered very little of the spider dreams.
The limbless spider had died while the Oneirophage slept. The Oneirophage rearranged the Umbilicus into a tattooing instrument again and used the spider's flesh to tattoo his left hand and fingers completely black. He then used its unspun webbing to add white eyes and, lastly, used the blood from the gory basin in its back to paint a red hourglass upon his palm. An instant later, the Oneirophage's entire left hand had been transformed into the likeness of a black widow.
The first rays of dawn began to filter through the skylights. Phantasmagorika had reappeared somewhere in the southern hemisphere of Grystiawa. Through his eastern window, the Oneirophage watched the tiny orb of Tyterviax rise like a single droplet of blood welling from a puncture wound on the tip of a phallus. Preparing for the hunt, the Oneirophage shuddered as his reinvigorated tattoos conducted the power of Satan through his flesh, his blood, and his soul, electrifying him with the dark energies of evil and the red-hot enlightenments of Hell. The Oneirophage could feel Satan watching him as he made his diurnal metamorphosis, even as Morpheus Rex was now watching the vermilion sunrise, the crimson badlands beneath it, and all that the blood-red sun portended.
5
Bearing the vermilion traceries of war upon his flesh, the Necrodelic stepped into his meditation chamber. Black ribs jutted through the flesh in his side, dripping blood from their jagged tips like feasting nightworms that drooled as they satiated their carnivorous appetites. The crepitus of his broken ribs was loud inside the still sanctum, and sounded as through someone was skinning a basilisk with a rusty saw. Chariah walked across the room to the opposite wall, and from his movements and invincible aura, it would have been impossible to detect that he had suffered even the slightest of injuries.
He grasped a bone lever on the wall near the Bloodbong and slowly pulled it down. Immediately, the interplanal portal beneath the giant pipe opened and unleashed the fires of Hell into the dark sanctuary, illuminating the labyrinths of rune-carved tubes and chambers, and the rivers and oceans of blood inside them. Chariah took hold of another skeletal lever in the wall and pulled again. This time, the portal in the ceiling above the Bloodbong's heart-chamber opened, and a large mass of demons tumbled into the scalding blood below. After a few moments, Chariah raised the lever, and the portal closed. A succubus who had only slid halfway through the irising gate when Chariah closed it was cut in half, her thrashing legs and dilated vagina plummeting to join the rest of the victims, her upper half left to die in the dungeon above.
The Necrodelic seated himself in the black lotus position and began to meditate. The Bloodbong's mouthpiece snaked its way to his lips, curving and rising through the air until it was between its master's black fangs. Chariah inhaled for five minutes straight, using the concentration and breathing techniques he had acquired over centuries of practice, just like deathmonks and other various mystics did. The others, though, breathed air. The Necrodelic breathed flesh and blood. The Necrodelic breathed death.
Mesmerized, Chariah watched the bodies dissolve into a gory soup of organs. A virgin screamed as she died. The echo of her voice traveled through the pipe and into Chariah's mouth as he inhaled. As the Necrodelic breathed in, the black ribs jutting from his side withdrew into his body like sentient creatures retreating into their burrows or dens. The flesh they had torn through began to visibly heal itself, and a moment later, it was as though he had never been scratched.
He inhaled again, gazing inside the Bloodbong as faces floated off of skulls, as heads floated from bodies, as brains floated out of mouths left hideously agape from a simultaneous combination of terrified screaming and instant rigor mortis. As he breathed in, one man's limbs were ripped from his torso, leaving him writhing like a dying merman in the hot crimson. The severed legs of the divided woman were twisted apart at the vagina and floated to the surface of the boiling blood, where they lurked like excorticated crocodiles until all the flesh had been smoked from them and their bones drifted back down into the crimson morass. A loose hand floated past, and behind it a winged spider drifted forth and pressed against the glass. Chariah inhaled more forcefully, and the winged spider exploded into black splinters, leaving behind a million tiny bubbles which the Necrodelic pondered one at a time while he savored the taste of smoked spiderflesh. Spiderwebs continued to float through the Bloodbong for hours, long after even the last bones had become sodden dust. They were all that remained of the dead arachnid. Of the slain demons, there were no remnants whatsoever.
Chariah's soul slowly fell away from his body as he entered into a deep state of necrodelia, floating downward, downward into a tomb, the tomb of the astral plane, where Mother Chaos greeted him.
"...the first steps on the stairway to salvation have been taken...you make me proud, my devotee..."
Chariah floated in a vibrating mirror of space, just above Mother Chaos. His astral erection pulsed and glowed. Mother Chaos whispered enlightenments beneath him.
"...Satan watches, even now...his fury breeds flies and black holes...wormholes to Hell and rocketing maggots in the corpse of space...we must be strong...take me now...we will fight Satan with sex..."
Mother Chaos' astral vagina constricted around Chariah's engorged member. Mother Chaos kissed him with spectral lips and then her vagina turned into a mouth, her mouth to a vagina. Chariah's tongue became a penis; his penis, a tongue. They writhed together for an eternal instant, and then the Dark Orgasm came to both of them, black hole supernovas nullifying their minds for an infinite moment, embracing them with nirvana and bringing the stench of vibrating death and twisted immortality.
The power of their Dark Orgasm inadvertently drew Satan forth. The malevolent father of the universe tantalized them with doom.
"Sweet meat, you are dying even now...to limbo with thee, to black judgment days in the inferno...Even now I feel the vibrations of your ghosts-to-be...You are no Jh'a'vyraa, neither one of you…”
Chariah and Mother Chaos fell deeper into the Dark Orgasm, driving Satan away with their black ecstasy. Satan drifted back to his fire-wombs and charred caverns in Hell. The touch of nirvana was
as poison to him.
The Necrodelic could hear his mistress calling to him through the juxtaposed mouth in her crotch. "...return now, malefic one...to the planet of the dream-eater...go forth, my dark champion...and show the Oneirophage why you shall be the Messiah of Death..."
With that, the rapture of the Dark Orgasm faded, and the astral bodies of Chariah and Mother Chaos, with genitals and oral organs reversed, began to regrow around the reversed body parts, faces growing around the juxtaposed mouth and tongue, legs sprouting from juxtaposed genitals. Chariah felt like he was being turned inside-out on a crucifix.
Chariah rose through the astral plane to his bestial spaceship. As he prepared for battle, Mother Chaos massaged the vestiges of his astral body which had remained in her plane to comfort her, black wisps like the ephemeral mists of Erebus. Satan in Hell laughed to himself as he masturbated to Mother Chaos' small solace.
The flames of Hell had died down to lambent embers in the interplanal portal. The blood in the Bloodbong moved sluggishly now, tepid, gelid, and clotted. Chariah reached and pulled the mouthpiece from between his charred lips with one clawed hand, then rose from the black lotus position and silently exited the meditation chamber.
Chariah flowed like shadows through the living labyrinth of the Omnibeast's innards. He entered the nexus of the spaceship, attached himself to a dozen umbilical cords, and began to search Grystiawa for the Oneirophage's lair. The Necrodelic found no trace of either the dream-eater or his ensorcelled palace, and it would be several hours later when he finally glimpsed Morpheus Rex. Upon a dawn-lit mountain range, with the rising sun swelling like a sore behind their pyramidal silhouettes and then bursting like a blister pricked upon their crimson peaks, spraying blood-red morning across the planet, he spied the Dreaming Predator.
The Omnibeast spun in mid-air so that the Overdragon faced north, pointed in the direction of Morpheus Rex's glittering figure. With a telepathic command through the umbilical cords attached to his skull, Chariah flew his bestial spaceship towards Morpheus Rex, weaving between sharp peaks and narrow passes as he descended into the mountain range. As the Dreaming Predator looked up from his fallen prey, the Overdragon opened its jaws and unleashed a fireball.
Morpheus Rex gazed upon the looming monstrosity with kaleidoscoping eyes. His left hand held up the slumping form of a paralyzed demon with the marks of a snakebite upon his throat, while his right hand held aloft the Prismsword. As the gargantuan spaceship sped towards him, Morpheus Rex could make out the form of the draconian figurehead breathing fire in his direction. Swinging the Prismsword in an arc, Morpheus Rex created a forcefield of flashing colors that deflected the fireball into a nearby mountain. Three more fireballs followed, each reflected and refracted away by the protective spectrum cast by the Prismsword. The final one ricocheted into the spaceship itself, scorching the black flesh beneath the Overdragon's head. The Omnibeast soared past Morpheus Rex with the effect of a sonic boom, echoing throughout the valleys and the mountain ranges and triggering several avalanches. The narrow pass upon which Morpheus Rex stood trembled as he held the five points of the Darkprism toward his paralyzed prey and absorbed the stiff body with a black spiral flash.
Thunderous reverberations vibrated through his serpent's glands as the bestial monstrosity pivoted in mid-air, changed direction, and approached again. This time a mammoth mantis figurehead served as the spaceship's front, ramming the opposite side of the mountain with its genetically and sorcerously hardened head. The entire mountaintop instantaneously turned into rubble. Pebbles, rocks, and boulders sprayed through the air, then rolled or plummeted to the valleys below.
Morpheus Rex sensed the incoming blow with his serpent's glands and leapt from the mountainside mere moments before impact. Holding his Prismsword and Spectrumhammer aloft in his outstretched arms, the Dreaming Predator hurtled through the thin air, an explosion of rocks, dust, and debris following right behind him. Avalanches erupted as the spaceship crashed through the mountaintop. Morpheus Rex looked back to see the giant, bleeding head of War Mantis breaking through the concentric circles of destruction, ringed by small asteroid belts that had been a mighty mountain just seconds ago.
Morpheus Rex landed catlike upon the ground fifty thousand feet below. He watched the skies as he began to wind his way through the caverns and valleys at the base of the mountain range. The gargantuan ship was too large to fly any distance into the mountains without destroying them on its way down, but given the Necrodelic's passion for destruction, Morpheus Rex had to be cautious of that possibility.
The Omnibeast made a few more passes over the mountains, casting fireballs as it flew and setting entire mountainsides aflame. After a few minutes, eight giant spider legs unfolded from its underbelly and it landed upon one of the mountaintops. Morpheus Rex wondered to himself why the Necrodelic didn't just destroy the entire mountain range in an attempt to murder him, then realized with a chill that it was because the Death Addict wanted to smoke him alive.
Hissing, the Dreaming Predator began to stalk the Omnibeast, creeping upwards toward his mammoth prey, winding his way along a spiraling mountain path into the skies. He slithered up sheer cliff faces, skulked through caverns, and prowled silently across catwalks, all the while watching his enemy above and the nearly-tangible shadows it cast across the mountains, his glands probing the air for movement, listening for attacks, heat, and premonitions. His prismatic glitterings served now as a type of camouflage, as he used them to blend in with his surroundings while he hunted.
Halfway between the jagged ground and the Omnibeast's perch, Morpheus Rex hid in the shadows of a small cavern and unslung the Rainbowspear from his back. Hefting it in his right hand, he used all of his ophidian senses to aim the projectile, then launched it in a spectral arc toward the seemingly torpid Omnibeast. At the exact same instant, a black tentacle burst from the bowels of the cave behind him and wrapped itself around his chest, squeezing him like an anaconda. The smell of the dark tendril, its temperature, and its vibrations were unmistakable. The tentacle belonged to the Necrodelic's bestial spaceship. It had been sent by the Omnibeast into the mountain range to seek him out and incapacitate him. As the Rainbowspear struck the ship's underbelly high above with a wet thud, the tentacle quivered sympathetically. Morpheus Rex used its momentary undulation to loosen its grip upon him, then hacked at it with his Prismsword. Bits of black flesh fell writhing to the ground, sometimes wriggling off the side of the mountain like suicidal nightworms. Morpheus Rex spun himself around in the tentacle's grip, then severed its tip by pinning the length of the tendril to the wall of the cavern with the Spectrumhammer and then chopping through it with the Prismsword. The mutilated tentacle screamed through the red mouth of its wound and retreated back into the caverns, up through the mountain to the spaceship, leaving a trail of blood behind.
Morpheus Rex unwound the amputated tentacle from his waist and threw it from the mountainside. Little black pieces of flesh were still milling around his ankles, and beginning to attach themselves to his skin like burnt leeches. One by one, he flicked them over the edge of the mountain with the tip of the Prismsword. The Rainbowspear was still buried in the sentient hull of the intergalactic leviathan above, its path a perfect rainbow from the center of his palm. Gripping the spectral tip, Morpheus Rex pulled upon the Rainbowspear to bring it back to his hand, as he had so many times before. This time, however, the Rainbowspear bore a passenger.
The Necrodelic perched like a raven upon the thin shaft of the Rainbowspear, with the demonic balance of a feline incubus. No muscle moved upon his body as he rode the projectile down its arching path, his hands raised in a fighting stance, his fingers spreadeagled, his dark claws whistling as they dismembered the air, his biceps tensed as they prepared to deliver a deathblow. Just before the Rainbowspear returned to the hand of its master, Chariah pounced, soaring through the air like the shadow of a horde of bats, tenebrous, silent, fluid, and ominous. He struck like a horde of bats as well, from everyw
here at once.
As he soared past, he grabbed Morpheus Rex by the hair with one hand and impaled him with the other. Morpheus Rex felt as though a portcullis had been dropped onto his chest. The momentum of Chariah's flight carried them both backwards. As they toppled, the Necrodelic drove a hard knee into Morpheus Rex's diaphragm, then rode him to the rocky floor of the cavern. Chariah landed atop Morpheus Rex, driving the air from his lungs with an explosion of blood from mouth and nose alike. The pressure of the Necrodelic's knee prevented any oxygen from returning. His four talons were still driven like spikes through the Dreaming Predator's chest, and were now anchored several inches deep within the mountain stone below.
Morpheus Rex gurgled, vomiting blood. Chariah drove his knee deeper into his guts, as far as he could, choking off and paralyzing his ruptured diaphragm. More ichor sputtered from Morpheus Rex's rainbow lips as he began to choke upon his own blood. Three of the four claws had impaled him through vital organs. Two had crucified him by the lungs, and the other had spitted him through the heart.
Chariah crouched over his fallen prey and snarled. Kneeling upon his victim, the Necrodelic twisted his claws, grinding the pain and the death into Morpheus Rex. His hand flexed back and forth, excruciatingly corkscrewing through his vitals, dismembering his lungs and heart, further enlarging the already gaping wounds.