by Brant Danay
As shattered crystal tinkled upon the ground, their musical sounds were joined briefly by the loud slap of flesh striking gelid water. Morpheus Rex made his way to the broken window and looked down. The ripples of the Necrodelic's impact were still fresh upon the surface of liquid drugs, but the Death Addict was nowhere to be seen.
The liquid gore flooding the room was now draining from the demolished side of the chamber, running off the edge in a wide, shallow cataract, as though from a dam of blood. Some of the severed heads, amputated limbs, and vivisected organs that lay strewn across the floor were caught up in the currents and washed over the edge, as well. Morpheus Rex scanned the moat one more time, and then the barren ground to the horizon and back again, before the urge to hunt overrode all else. The wastelands were beckoning, calling him to come and replenish the prey that had been destroyed the night before. It was the call of the hunted and the damned, and Morpheus Rex could do nought but obey its deadly command.
8
Chariah cursed as he struck the surface of the moat, not from disgust or anger at the Oneirophage's small victory, but because of his aversion to water. Such revulsions soon disappeared from his mind, however, for as Chariah sank through the brightly colored waters of the psychedelic moat, the liquid drugs infiltrated his body from everywhere at once and immediately took effect. He inhaled them through his nostrils and swallowed them in gulping mouthfuls. They seeped into his cuts and open wounds. They crawled into his ears, creeped into his eyes, and slithered into his urethra. The Necrodelic floated in a liquid prism, a billion colors flashing and flowing around him. The red sun Tyterviax flickered like fire over the broken mirror of the surface. Both seemed to be within arm's reach and yet, at the same time, seemed parsecs away. Chariah felt like a grain of diamond in an hourglass filled with crushed jewels, its concave sides refracting and distorting the universe around him. Demonic contortionists danced around the timepiece and peered inside, where Chariah had grown from a fragment of diamond dust into a small fetus, a pet fetus kept in an hourglass, by whose development the demons kept time. He continued to grow until the hourglass shattered. The chronodemons dispersed in a swirl of broken colors.
The psychedelic drugs created unique sensations at every point of entry. One eye wept while the other hallucinated. One ear heard music, the other voices. One nostril smelled smoke, the other decay. He held an entire universe in his mouth, within which he could taste everything from the galaxies and supernovas and black holes to every single droplet of every single ocean, every grain of sand and dirt on every planet, every single organism from demon to human to centaur to beast to cockroaches and their eggs, and then all the living parasites and all the viruses in every single one of those organisms. His gashes, punctures, and abrasions filled with shamanic mercuries that were at once salve and salt, panacea and poison, analgesic and corrosive acid. His erect phallus was in a constant state of orgasm, for minutes, hours, years, centuries, millennia, eons. Forever, the eternal orgasm would last, for as long as space and time existed, for infinity and beyond.
The moat-waters were a thick ambrosial swill. Chariah now felt as though he were trapped inside a crystal ball, floating inside its murky spectrum, swimming like a fish through reflections and refractions while eating and drinking colors. Mother Chaos appeared outside the curved glass, a pink and purple giantess, her features distorted by the concavity of the window through which she gazed. She peered into the transparent globe like a seeress and watched him floating inside it like an embryo in a womb, her child and her familiar. She placed her pink hands upon the sorcerous orb and hypnotized him with her purple eye contact.
"...you must find the dungeons..." she whispered, then kissed the glass outside with her purple lips. The crystal ball exploded into a million fractal pieces, and then Mother Chaos was blowing him along the rainbow currents, along the colored winds of space, deeper and deeper, further and further, until he washed up on a shore of crushed diamonds, the tides of the psychedelic ocean depositing him upon the glittering beach along with all the other bodies it had washed up before.
Chariah walked across the diamond sands, the sea of liquid drugs sparkling before him. He approached the other bodies upon the beach, fierce incubi and beautiful succubi, but when he reached them, he found them to be corpses, their flesh rotted black, the stench of decay strong upon the coastal winds. When he looked upon them a second time, the flesh fell away, leaving behind skeletons made of jewels. Chariah glanced fearfully around himself now. All the demons had turned into glittering, jeweled bones, their rictus grins smiling and laughing. The psychedelic sea washed another succubus ashore, who decayed when Chariah gazed upon her and left behind a diamond skeleton.
Then the waves of liquid drugs began to grow larger and stronger, until one massive psychedelic tsunami swept Chariah up in its grasp. The crystal waters pumped more liquid drugs into his body as he rode along the crest of the giant wave, which continued to exponentially expand by the moment, until Chariah feared it was growing too large, and then it outgrew the entire universe, tumbling Chariah through the black void of the cosmos into the astral plane, where Mother Chaos caught him in her arms like a falling infant. Mother Chaos was still a giantess, and he was the still the size of an embryo. He suckled upon the purple nipples of her breasts and found her damson milk saturated with yet more mind-twisting drugs. Eventually, he transformed into the child of a shamaness, nursing itself upon hallucinogenic lactations. He drank from her gargantuan breasts until he had grown back to his normal size.
Chariah stepped outside his flesh to observe himself and found that he was made entirely of crystal, his brain a glass sculpture in his crystal ball head, his organs visible beneath the transparent panes of his flesh, as translucent as the skin he pondered them through. He felt fragile, afraid that he would break if he moved; afraid that the winds and the tides, and the orbits of the planets and the gravitation pull of the stars, would shatter him if he did not.
Chariah floated in the liquid cosmos now, past planets that were giant eyeballs, stars that were flaming hearts, comets that were monstrous phalluses, and black holes that were bottomless vaginas. The universe was reflected in his fragile body, upon his crystal flesh and within his glass organs. Sparkling crystal spiderwebs began to fall around him now, catching him in their diaphanous nets and becoming indistinguishable from his flesh. Soon, the humongous spiderwebs filled his vision, some with souls stuck in their viscid tangles. Black spiders began to swim beside him, wrapping him up like prey in their crystallized tapestries. His limbs were bound in the restrictive fluids, his body wrapped in a sac of shimmering ectoplasm. The spiders escorted him to a beautiful spaceship composed entirely of glittering spiderwebs, levels within levels with levels, a palace of ladders and hammocks, step pyramids and labyrinths. Chariah gazed around in wonder as he was borne upon the back of an arachnid beast of burden. Within the spaceship were winged spiders, hybrid centaur-like spidaurs, and humongous arachnisauruses. Mandala spiderwebs provided enlightenment and sorcery. The spiders bore him inward on a spiraling maze until they reached the chamber of the queen, a solid white hive of spiderweb, the only area in the entire spaceship with solid walls, floor, and ceiling. Chariah was carried inside a tunneling door that worked somewhat like a sphincter muscle, and presented to Spidratha, the First Spider, from whom all spiderkind was descended and whom all spiders worshipped.
The gargantuan Spidratha was seated upon a throne of decaying corpses, in the center of which she laid her eggs. She had two legs, six arms, eight breasts, and a thousand eyes. Eight of those eyes glowed in red pairs upon her face. The rest were ommatidia, black window-panes adorning her entire head. All of them now gazed upon the Necrodelic at once. She gestured to some of her servants, who brought Chariah platters of flaming spiders, burning alive upon steaming plates.
"Please accept our offerings of spiderflesh", the queen Spidratha spake.
Chariah inhaled the black smoke curling up from the writhing spiders as they burne
d. The necrodelic drugs of flesh and death cleared his mind and calmed his soul.
"Necrodelic, I have a bargain to make with thee. Soon, we will be invading Grystiawa. In addition to the continued pursuit of the Jh'a'vyraa, we also have a blood debt to settle with the Oneirophage. We seek your alliance in the coming war against the Dreaming Predator. In exchange, you shall be given one thousand spiders of your choosing, to smoke or do with as you please."
Chariah breathed the essence of the dying spiders. There were enlightenments to be gained from spiderflesh, and ten hecatombs of any organism was an offer he could not refuse in a universe which was becoming increasingly devoid of life.
"I accept", spake the Necrodelic.
"Excellent", Spidratha replied. "Together, we will annihilate the Oneirophage. Afterwards, perhaps you will join me, and rule the spider realm beside me. I might desire you for my king, Necrodelic..." Spidratha said in parting, as Chariah found himself dropping straight down through the spiders' spaceship upon a single strand of webbing, descending through the arachnids' intergalactic lair and then through the cosmos, where he dangled amongst the galaxies upon a single umbilical string.
Chariah dangled upon the strand of spiderweb for an indeterminate length of time, watching planets orbit stars, watching supernovas explode and black holes implode, all with massive synesthesias of every sensory organ, seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting the cosmos he observed. Eventually, Mother Chaos flew to his hanging soul and detached him from the spiderweb. Together, they soared away in another direction.
His pink and purple guardian angel swam alongside his diaphanous form, a creatrix and sorceress, his lover and soulmate, the Mistress of Entropy and Queen of Anarchy, his beloved Mother Chaos. The entire universe had been submerged in psychedelic liquids, so that he now had to swim from planet to planet, from star to star, through galaxies and black holes and wormholes. Mother Chaos led him by the hand to a ruby planet. Laughing severed heads occasionally floated by, as well as extracted organs that still pulsed, and amputated limbs that still reached out or tried to walk. Mother Chaos brought Chariah to the rim of the ruby planet, and they dove in together.
Chariah's glass soul felt as though it could break at any time. Narcissistic sirens came to admire their reflections in his glass body. They swam through ruby water until the skies turned black, and then Chariah was suddenly plucked from the side of his protector.
The booming laughter of Satan made Chariah's body tinkle and start to crack. Satan held him by the nape of his neck like a cub, placing him down in the center of a black pentagram atop a flaming pedestal. Satan's phallic horns were bleeding. Chariah could see severed heads floating through the veins and arteries of his external circulatory system. Satan's aura was so hot it threatened to melt him where he stood, or make him spontaneously combust.
Satan spoke with a voice that reverberated a million times, so that every word echoed at once when he had finished speaking.
"Sweet larva, you are nothing but a maggot in the decay of my sperm... Such pleasures I shall know, once you have returned to Hell, my rapeling...The universe is my torture chamber, and I'll not have a sweetmeat like you, with so much blood to be spilled and so much sin to be consumed, transcending it.."
Satan lowered his horned head to fix his black hole eyes upon the Necrodelic, sucking at his very soul with his eye contact. Demons clambered about inside his mouth, some impaled upon his fangs, some meditating upon his tongues, others copulating in sadomasochistic orgies. When Satan spoke again, his voice was full of fury, and every syllable he spoke caused a part of the crystallized Chariah to break off, shatter, or explode.
"This is my game. I created it. I possess it. I own everything in the entire universe. I own you. You are one of my favorite possessions, and my immortal soul will be destroyed before you ever become the Jh'a' vyraa."
Satan bent even closer.
"Listen to me. You will never become the Jh'a'vyraa. I am omnipotent, and I will use all of my powers to ensure that you never escape me. Cockroaches have a better chance of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa than you. You are my slave. You are my catamite. You are my bitch."
Chariah's crystal form fell apart as Satan laughed, leaving glass shards atop the pentagram and a spectral cloud of dust, as though an hourglass had exploded. When the cloud dissipated, Chariah had regained his black demon form, and stood with crimson eyes blazing, muscular chest slowly rising up and down, claws gleaming in the glow of Hellfire.
Satan continued to laugh, but stopped abruptly when he looked down again to find the Necrodelic before him in full demonic incarnation. His soul had not disintegrated into shards to be swept into Hell, and Chariah stood reborn before him, more evil and more powerful than ever.
"Who do you think you are?" Satan demanded.
"I am the Overdemon. I am the Messiah of Death. I am the Jh'a'vyraa."
"You are no Overdemon", Satan laughed.
"Fuck you", Chariah hissed.
"You are no Messiah of Death", Satan spat, expectorating souls as he chewed off each syllable.
"Fuck you," the Necrodelic repeated.
"You are no Jh' a' vyraa", Satan roared, as black smoke began to billow from all around and the fires of Hell burned brighter and higher than ever before.
"FUCK YOU", Chariah screamed, in a voice loud enough to rival Satan's.
Satan smashed the pentagrammed pedestal beneath his black-ringed fist, but the Necrodelic had already gone, faded away, floated elsewhere, drifting along the currents of the cosmos.
Mother Chaos rejoined him as they swam upwards towards a black hole at the top of the universe. She took his dark hand in her pink fingers and led him through space and time.
"...you must swim into that black hole, my love...labyrinths await...but remember that labyrinths are a form of chaos...and I will be able to aide you, should the need arise..."
With that, Mother Chaos let go Chariah's hand and fell as if from a great height, while the Necrodelic swam towards the black hole at the top of the universe. He flowed along its event horizon and then rode the waves of destruction inside, for one instant flying faster than he had ever imagined possible, as though he were being borne on a dark tsunami the entire length of the universe, billions upon billions of light years in a single second. His hair blew back, his lips curled away from his fangs. He couldn't move any of his muscles, his arms were fixed in place, spread out into space at his sides, his claws splayed and shredding the very fabric of space and time as he was borne through the universe in one infinite rush. Centrifugal and centripetal forces paralyzed him, paralyzed the very thoughts in his brain, paralyzed his very soul. For an instant, it was like Dark Orgasm, all emptiness and nothingness, voids and silences, and then an instant later he was deposited, dripping with liquid drugs, inside a dank hallway made entirely of prism. Behind him was a black pit, at whose bottom the crystal waters of the psychedelic moat rose and fell in small waves. The Necrodelic had escaped into the sewers of Phantasmagorika, somewhere beneath the crimson Grystiawan ground and the surface of the psychedelic moat.
Exhausted, Chariah laid down in a shallow, spreading pool of crystal hallucinogens, their chemicals still pumping through his arteries and veins, their visions still replaying over and over in his head. It was as though an oracle had been surgically implanted in his brain and then hermetically sealed within, never to be amputated or excised, forever to spin its dizzying sceneries around his throbbing mind's eye.
9
The Oneirophage reclined against the gore-stained pillows of his bed, Umbilicus in one hand, a prism goblet full of blood in the other, sipping dreams from the brain of a purple eunuch. He was surrounded by carnage. Twenty-seven limbless bodies lay upon the blankets, the remnants of a mass sacrifice earlier that evening. The Oneirophage had many wounds to heal after the previous night's battle with the Necrodelic, and had augmented the numbers of the day's prey with the remaining bodies from his flesh reservoirs. The debris of battle still littered his bedc
hamber. The floor, walls, and ceiling were still stained scarlet. Some of the blood was now his own, and some the Necrodelic's.
Some of the carnal debris had washed over the edge of the broken window in a cataract of blood, but a large amount of shrunken heads, swollen organs, piles of sodden entrails, and grotesquely eroded skeletons still decorated the room. His sentient chains had healed themselves and shackled the day's captives. The Amputator had been sluggish because of all the blood in its gears and the rust setting in from the drenchings of gore.
The eastern window was completely gone, which meant that the entire side of the Oneirophage's bedchamber was exposed to the night. A few winged spiders flew through the opening. The Oneirophage promptly murdered and devoured them. He gazed through the window as he swallowed the dreams of a hermaphrodite, the bifurcated Umbilicus plunged symmetrically into both sets of genitalia. As he drifted into drugged slumber, the stolen dreams of the hermaphrodite unfolded in his head. The Oneirophage dreamt of double masturbation, of self-fertilization, of perverted narcissisms that led to infanticides, persecutions, and moments of solitude atop mountaintops and inside quarantined caverns, on forbidden planets and in bestial spaceships. He dreamt of worlds where hermaphrodites were worshipped as messiahs, and others where they were exiled as pariahs. He dreamt of double castration with a saw. He dreamt of hermaphrodite children, who raped and then killed him, or were raped and then killed by him. The Oneirophage dreamt he was a hermaphrodite, masturbating with a saw and giving birth to Morpheus Rex after Morpheus Rex, until he was buried in them. He dreamt of Siamese twins, one male and one female, making love to one another in gardens of drugs. He dreamt of himself and Morpheus Rex as Siamese twins, conquering Satan, slaying the universe, together becoming the Jh'a'vyraa. He dreamt of nirvanas where Morpheus Rex and the Oneirophage made love for all eternity.