by Brant Danay
Chariah made his way through and around the piles and pits of waste material. The jackal-headed and hyena-faced harpies growled and barked as he passed, but did not attack, for the black stalker showed no interest in their rotten food and precious carrion. Still, the Necrodelic's mission was genocide, and every death was a step toward the ascendancy of the Jh'a'vyraa. Thus, the jackal-headed and hyena-faced harpies were attacked by the Necrodelic's pyromancy, spontaneously combusting and adding their steaming shrapnel to the piles of flesh and waste, becoming part of the refuse they had dwelled in and feasted on just moments before. The gnarled, genetically twisted demons melted into translucent puddles of liquid flesh before the gesture of his right hand. Maggots, nightworms, and cockroaches were likewise roasted or crushed underfoot. Swarms of flies were set afire as a single entity, glowing like will-o-the-wisps for a few moments before dropping one by one to the ground. Finally, nought survived but Chariah and the fungus beasts. As the oily smoke of burning bodies, the incense of immolated flesh, and the stench of charred garbage billowed in the air, the Necrodelic prepared to battle the gigantic, shuffling, fungoid monstrosities.
The fungus beasts were as tall as twenty feet and perpetually quivered, even when standing still. Their bodies of amorphous mold could be shaped in any manner they chose while they matured, and thus no two were even remotely similar. Their evil spirits sculpted their malleable physical incarnations with psychotic whim and wicked purpose until they reached adulthood, growing body parts as they saw fit, molding their flesh like clay. The fungus demons were autosurgeons, experimenting on themselves while they developed from spore to monster, performing their own amputations and augmentations, grafts, transplants, and sex changes. They were sculptors of their own flesh, artists whose very bodies were their masterpieces. They were abundant throughout the universe, and extremely dangerous.
There were four fungus beasts altogether, the largest one green and waving hundreds of tentacles while a fanged mouth in the middle of his body formed a tunnel that was ringed with sharp fangs all the way through to its other side, where a duplicate mouth opened and masticated. Another was brown with black spots, a giant horned slug of tremendous girth with scales down its back and a manticore's tail. A smaller female resembling a gorgon had mushrooms for hair and dripped electric blue psilocybin from her breasts and vagina. Upon the wall was a gray-black mildew that stretched for several feet, with hundreds of eyestalks that stood phallically erect as it became sexually excited, its myriad eyeballs watching voyeuristically from where it clung.
The giant with green tentacles and the sluglike behemoth attacked first. Chariah's claws flashed like ten swords in the air, leaving dozens of severed tentacles writhing on the floor in a matter of seconds. As the giant slug made its charge, Chariah breathed fire from his lungs, driving it back with a high-pitched shriek, mold sizzling and crackling upon its body. As he did so, however, he was trapped in the clutches of the tentacled one, and borne toward it's gaping mouth. The Necrodelic could see the other side of the chamber through its second mouth as it drew him closer.
Chariah braced his clawed feet against the beast's fangs, preventing it from chewing or swallowing him. The rings of teeth clashed all the way up and down its throat like a meat grinder. Calling upon his necromancy, Chariah unleashed the power of Satan into his muscles and veins, causing the tentacles which gripped him to explode and rain down like shrapnel as he powered from their clutches with Hellborn strength. The Necrodelic alighted with pantherish dexterity upon the creature's emerald lips. As the tentacles sought him out again like heat-seeking missiles, he deftly caught them in his clawed fists, and shoved them into the fungus beast's maw. A second later, as the Necrodelic jumped from the creature's mouth to the floor below, the fungus beast chewed off several of its own tentacles with a scream of anguish.
As Chariah alighted upon the ground, the aggressive horned slug charged again. When it was within mere inches of him, the Necrodelic jumped straight up, flipped over, twisted in midair, and landed atop the creature's back, all the while severing the flailing tentacles that shot towards him.
Chariah rode the horned slug like a bestial steed, using his palms to take over its brain and driving it headfirst into the tentacled fungus beast's iron maiden gullet, which reflexively closed and decapitated its brother. The headless body fell heavily to the ground, knocking over heaps of severed limbs and waste as it did so, then several more as it thrashed with violent death throes.
The mushroom gorgon was before him now, her tits and vagina leaking electric blue psilocybin, flowing in streamlets down her torso and thighs. As she drew closer, her eyes wept shimmering psilocybin, and she began drooling and sweating the psychedelic substance as well. Just the fumes were enough to disorient the Necrodelic, and he soon found himself being doused with the deadly fluid in twin arches from her erect nipples. The drug seeped through his skin by osmosis, and the room began to sway and shift as Chariah began to hallucinate.
An instant later, he found himself suckling from the mushroom gorgon's teat. She sang to him like a siren and caressed him like a succubus mother as she nursed him with psilocybin. She then gripped his hair and buried his face in her genitals. Her siren's song coaxed his tongue between her labia, her temptress' sorceries hypnotizing him to perform cunnilingus upon her fungoid body, drinking more blue psilocybin as he did so.
Fighting his own consciousness, Chariah struggled against the psychedelic fluids and called forth Hellfire from his throat. He breathed the Hellfire into the mushroom gorgon's vagina. Her labia blackened and peeled back like skin from a wound. Her vaginal walls melted into black lava.
The Hellfire blew through her womb and up into her body, scorching everything in its path. The fungus beast burned from the inside out, her vital organs reduced to little bits of charcoal before the flames even reached her brain. When they did, they burst from the crown of her head like a raging inferno. The mushroom gorgon blackened and fell to ash as the smell of cooked psilocybin filled the air.
The smoke of her burning flesh turned the psychedelia in Chariah's consciousness into necrodelia, making him even more deadly. Halfway submerged in the astral plane, his senses razor-sharp, the Necrodelic burned the psilocybin from his brain. He was enlightened from the drug of her immolated flesh, and power raged through his body like black electricity. He caught the green tentacled fungus beast with his claws as it descended upon him, lifting it into the air with the strength of a thousand demons, and hurling it at the mildew demon on the wall, who had been merely observing the combat with its voyeuristic eyestalks. Those same eyestalks which had been so erect with sexual arousal from the fisticuffs now shriveled as the monstrosity was hurled towards it, its black pupils dilated in terror. The tentacled monster splattered against the wall with an ear-splitting, wet, smashing sound, instantly killing it and its mildew brother beneath it. The two fungus beasts dripped down the wall as one, sliding with sucking noises like those of copulation, their blood and liquefied flesh intermingling and pooling on the floor. While their pulped corpses continued to runnel and seep through the chamber, Chariah found a stairway in the back corner and ascended to the upper levels of Phantasmagorika's sewers.
As Chariah climbed to the highest levels of the sewers, the piles of severed limbs grew progressively fresher, so whereas he had seen mostly mummified remnants before, he now saw several still-bleeding appendages. Finally, Chariah climbed one last ladder of dead serpents, this one stretching for over one hundred feet along a curved wall that overlooked one last cistern of gore. This cistern served as the main depository of the castle, where all of the waste initially accumulated. The foul lake bubbled and foamed, churning with loud machinery grinding and scraping at its bottom, unseen beneath the murky depths, which filtered the blood and other substances before sending them further downwards. Hundreds of pipes jutting from the walls were pouring blood, sperm, venom, opium residue and used dreams into the cylindrical chamber. Several others lay dormant.
As Chariah ascended the ladder of ophidian cadavers, the light of Phantasmagorika's ground levels a shining beacon high above, he reflected upon his quest through the sewers of the prism palace. He began to notice the correlations between the architecture, functionality, and quiddity of Phantasmagorika with the inner workings of the body, mind, and soul of the Oneirophage. Recalling pipes that bore spilled blood like aqueducts throughout the palace, garbage chutes jammed with body parts, and overflowing landfills and trash compactors, Chariah realized that, like the Oneirophage's brain, the workings of Phantasmagorika's sewage system were as intricate as those of a city, though not as efficiently maintained. Chariah did not believe that they were they were maintained at all, much like the Oneirophage's subconscious. It also seemed as though everything the Oneirophage had ever used was obsessively retained in his palace sewers and cisterns, like precious, rotten, festering memories accrued in the dark corners of his brain. Chariah also observed that nothing within the walls of Phantasmagorika ever dried. Drug residue, snake venom, vomit, sweat, spilled blood, sperm ejaculated in both masturbation and rape, and the remnants of everyone he had ever slain, all seemed to be preserved in the subterranean labyrinth, along with all the accumulated waste and garbage of the Oneirophage's millennia of existence within the prism palace.
As Chariah climbed hand over hand along the serpentine rungs, his black brain grew even darker with knowledge and enlightenment. Upon reaching the top of the dead snake ladder he gazed down one last time upon the sewers of Phantasmagorika, using his necromantic powers to observe with sorcerous and X-ray vision the path of psychic residue he had left behind, the black trail of his own soul through the maze of glittering gutters and cisterns. Casting a spell of memory, Chariah etched a map of Phantasmagorika's sewers in his mind, carved in crimson with a psychic dagger upon the innards of his brain. Then, with the freshly incised map still bleeding deep within the labyrinths of his mind, amongst a myriad of other such cartographic lacerations and scars, the Necrodelic emerged into the lights of Phantasmagorika's rotunda.
11
Serpentikal was a labyrinth, a living ophidian maze whose infinite coils were the walls and edifices of the twisted and spiraling streets of his realm, whose bodily orifices were snakepits, and whose very body formed Serpentopolis, a city for his kin to dwell in. Floating in the cosmos like a bestial spaceship, Serpentikal's neck stretched upwards for several hundred feet, culminating in the head of a gargantuan king cobra. His hood flared, his eyes glowed crimson, and he carried his queen, His soulmate, the Constrictress, was knotted around one of his pike-sized fangs, her legs and arms wrapped around it like giant serpents unto themselves. In a yab-yum like position she copulated with the fang as it ejaculated venom into her womb.
The Oneirophage spied upon Serpentikal from his bloodstained bed, one hand languidly holding the Umbilicus to his lips while he sucked dreams from the exposed brains of his writhing bedmates. Voyeuristically stargazing, he watched the universe flow by, enjoying for another night the scenery of the cosmos. As the orbits of Serpentikal and Phantasmagorika slowly pulled the two together, their gravities attracting each another at the same time, the Oneirophage made eye contact with the snake titan, drawing the gigantic floating fortresses even closer. The colossal cobra head soon filled the entire window, the Constrictress wrapped seductively around his right fang. When he spoke, his forked tongue flickered in and out of the room, lashing the cool air of the open bedchamber.
"Oneirophage," Serpentikal hissed, "my dream-swallowing scion. It has been many skins since last we met."
The Oneirophage nodded towards his ancestor, speaking the serpent tongue with the same susurrating tone.
"Welcome," he said, stretching out his tattooed arms, his three forked tongues dangling from his lips, "to Phantasmagorika."
Serpentikal spoke again, his voice a whisper as loud as a scream.
"I see you have evolved into a powerful entity, a demon worthy of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa. I have come to you this night with both a warning and an offering. Soon, Spidratha and her minions will attack Grystiawa. She has allied herself with the Necrodelic, and together they seek to destroy you. You will be outnumbered when her arachnid armies land, and shall be forced to flee your homeworld or die with it. Though your blood is not pure and your genes have been contaminated, still you are one of my descendants, and so, half-breed, for the opportunity to gain vengeance upon my former arachnid lover, and in our mutual pursuit of the Jh'a'vyraa, I offer you my protection and alliance. Speak the word, and I shall direct my course to Grystiawa. The serpents and spiders shall wage one final, apocalyptic battle before the universe comes to an end. Consider this, my mutant grandson, while you enjoy the gift of two hundred gorgon heads."
As Serpentikal spoke of the gorgons, the Constrictress made a gesture toward the back of her lover's throat. Shortly thereafter, a long anaconda slithered up Serpentikal's gullet, over his tongue, between his fangs, and into the bedchamber. Upon its back, in one solid row, were the decapitated heads of the gorgons. The anaconda poured into the room for several minutes, folding back upon itself to fit within the confines of the bedchamber, until its tail emerged with the skull of the two hundredth sacrificial victim impaled upon its tip. The gorgon heads were arrayed as though upon a table, still living, their serpent hair writhing, their dreams ready to be imbibed.
The Oneirophage reached out and began to partake of the gift, first sipping the bubbling green dreams from one of the decapitated heads, then thirstily drinking more with increasingly greater swallows.
"Thank you, First Serpent", the Oneirophage spake in gratitude as he drove the Umbilicus through the right eye of the next gorgon head, who screamed a bloodcurdling cry as he did so. The Oneirophage began sucking the dreams from her brain.
"I will indeed accept your offer. Come to Grystiawa, and together we shall annihilate Spidratha and the Necrodelic."
Serpentikal hissed his approval. "Tis done. Constrictress, prepare Serpentopolis for war. We leave for the Tyterviax system immediately."
"Yes, my lord", the boa queen answered, spiraling from his fang like an unraveling vine, then disappearing down his throat.
Serpentikal began pulling back from the open window, speaking one final time as he withdrew the massive bulk of his labyrinthine body from beside the prism palace. "Prepare yourself, Oneirophage. Your red planet is about to become much redder."
With a final flick of his tongue, Serpentikal soared away into the cosmos, leaving the Oneirophage to contemplate his wake through the open window. After spending several minutes in rumination, the Oneirophage made his way over to the gorgon heads. The large anaconda had been left behind to serve him as a table, submissive living furniture for him to dine from. With the Umbilicus in hand, the Oneirophage began to suck the dreams from another gorgon's brain. He dreamed of Serpentikal, and of making love to the Constrictress. He then dreamt prophecies of the impending combat. Plunging the straw through the skull of another gorgon and imbibing green dreams, the Oneirophage dreamt that his body parts were all snakes, his head the head of a gorgon, his fingers and toes rattlesnakes, his twin penises a boa constrictor and a cobra, his intestines an anaconda, his tongue a black mamba, his lungs sidewinders, and his circulatory system Serpentikal himself.
Gathering up four more gorgon heads and carrying them by their ophidian tresses to the bed with him, the Oneirophage lay himself down once again and drank gorgon dreams until he was in a soporific stupor. As he closed his eyes, he saw green darkness instead of black. The last thing he dreamt before falling into a deep slumber was a simultaneous pair of parallel nightmares, one about a spider caught in its own web, and the other of a serpent caught in its own coils, each struggling, contorting, screaming, bleeding, retching, thrashing, twitching, and, ultimately, dying within their own traps.
12
Chariah spent an entire day exploring Phantasmagorika and analyzing his enemy. As twilight finally began to fall, Chariah found himself ascending a long stairway.
At the top of the steps was a window facing the descending red sun. The stained glass glowed like Satan's third eye. Chariah gazed through the kaleidoscopic window and watched Tyterviax sink. At the exact moment of sunset, the stairway transformed into a ramp, throwing Chariah off his feet. He tumbled violently down the sheer and slippery length and struck the back of his head upon the floor below. After a few moments, he slowly rose to one knee and shook the pain from his skull. Then the voices came.
Soft and solemn, the voices gradually grew louder and louder, and were soonafter accompanied by the plodding tread of footsteps. Chariah began to follow the voices through the palace. The heavy footsteps, likewise, began to follow him.
"The universe is its own torture chamber...
Step...
Echo...
"It lashes itself with nebulae..."
Step...
"And infects itself with demons..."
Step...echo...step...echo...step...
Chariah froze in the alcoved hall, gazing back and forth. His eyes flared red with night-vision as he illuminated corners and sifted through shadows. The voices beckoned him like the song of a siren, even as the footsteps of the unseen stalker slowly hunted him from behind. The Necrodelic chased the ephemeral speaker while simultaneously fleeing the plodding pursuer.
Caught somewhere between the realms of predator and prey, the Necrodelic followed the voices up a spiral rampway. He paused at the top, peering down another corridor. There was silence before him and darkness behind him. On silent feet, Chariah began walking down the hall.