Demonmachy: Demonic Apocalypse (Messiah of Death)

by Brant Danay

  The bestial spaceship nestled atop the Oneirophage's prism palace like a symbiote. The Arachniotics held Phantasmagorika fast with its spider legs, as though it were ravishing the entire palace. The body of the Omnibeast was mounted atop the prone fortress like a giant hermaphrodite rapist. Its four figureheads stretched out to the north, south, east, and west like monstrous sentinels, intently studying the planet. Eight hydra heads thrashed from the roof of the bestial spaceship as though trying to devour the rising Tyterviax. After a few minutes, several streams of blood and sperm began oozing down the walls of the prism palace. The Omnibeast had invaded Phantasmagorika.

  Morpheus Rex awoke to the sight of black tentacles bursting through his open window and squirming through his bedchamber. They were lifting gorgon heads with their prehensile tips, groping through floor and walls, and thrashing on the bed beside him. One of the tendrils was wrapped around his waist, while another encircled his throat. Morpheus Rex stabbed the tentacles with the Umbilicus, lining them with wounds that looked like crimson suckers. The tendril around his neck was strangling him now, lifting and hanging him like a living noose. His freshly transformed legs kicked in mid-air as he struggled to free himself. He clawed at the tentacle and tried to pry it loose. He stabbed it with the Umbilicus, over and over, and then, with a twirl of his fingers, transformed the Umbilicus from a single straw into one with ten tips, increasing its potential for damage tenfold. Blood began to drip down the length of the tentacle as the circular puncture wounds grew exponentially in number.

  The Omnibeast's grip began to loosen in the slick ichor, allowing Morpheus Rex to slip down several inches and sink his fangs into the moist spongy flesh of the tentacular gallows. The long tendril fell instantly in a dead coiled mass to the bed, the body of Morpheus Rex dropping down right beside it.

  Morpheus Rex bit and stabbed his way through the tentacles, catching them in his mouth in mid-air and suffusing them with serpent venom, impaling them upon the tips of the Umbilicus. Two of the tentacles were tactilely exploring the Amputator with nerve-sensitive suckers and nerve-clustered tips. The Dreaming Predator stepped to the side of the machine and began turning its giant wheel. Guillotine blades began to fall, over and over, slicing the inquisitive appendages into quivering bloody segments.

  The bedchamber fell silent as the battle ended. The Omnibeast withdrew its poisoned tendrils and bleeding tentacle stumps back through the window. Morpheus Rex surveyed the carnage. The sliced remnants of black tentacles were everywhere, as though the bedchamber had been infested with nightworms. Fresh blood and gore filled the room, adding to the copious quantities already accumulated there throughout the millennia.

  Morpheus Rex twirled the Umbilicus back to a single straw, then stuck it beneath the skin of his left forearm, where he often kept it in a sheath of his own flesh. He looked upon the black mass of living tissue breathing in his window, recognizing it as that of the Omnibeast. A premonition came then, unbidden to his mind, and the Dreaming Predator suddenly realized that the Necrodelic had infiltrated Phantasmagorika.

  He immediately departed the room and headed for the weapons gallery, slamming the door to his bedchamber behind. As he hurried down the hall, he could see the tentacles, entrails, organs, genitals, and eyeballs of the Omnibeast pressed grotesquely against the skylights above, smashed up against the transparent prism ceiling beneath the immense weight of the bestial spaceship. All the way down the hall he could see nothing but the black flesh enwombing his palace, mixing its shadows with the rainbows of his prism walls in an unholy union of color and darkness.

  With the hallway bathed in tenebrous gloom, Morpheus Rex failed to notice the one part of the ceiling that was even blacker than the rest. He passed underneath, oblivious to the presence over his head. As he continued to hurry down the hall, Morpheus Rex did not hear the silent feet of the Necrodelic as the Death Addict dropped down behind him. The Dreaming Predator, in fact, sensed nothing of his stalker until the Necrodelic's black claws raked his chest from behind, pulling him back against the hot body of the death-smoker.

  The tattooed skin of Morpheus Rex's back stuck to the Necrodelic's burn wounds. The Necrodelic buried his talons in the bloody furrows slashed across Morpheus Rex's chest and then, with a single claw, he slit Morpheus Rex's throat like an assassin. Driving his talons still deeper into Morpheus Rex, cutting through ribs and cartilage, the Necrodelic jabbed his fangs into Morpheus Rex's neck. One sharp tooth pierced Morpheus Rex's jugular vein, while the other stabbed through his carotid artery. The Necrodelic began drinking Morpheus Rex's dream-laden blood like a vampire, his claws digging further into his chest as he did so. One razor talon grazed his heart and nicked his aorta, while the others began to make their way through his sternum, solar plexus, and entrails. Morpheus Rex twisted against the fangs of the Necrodelic and the claw which had settled in the crevices between his atria and ventricles. Morpheus Rex was impaled by the circulatory system. His hands, however, were free. He pulled the Umbilicus from the skin of his forearm, raised it to his frothing rainbow lips, and blew. The straw immediately shot out in all directions, arching backwards over his head and burying itself in the Necrodelic's face, skull, neck, and back.

  The myriad tips of the straws embedded themselves in the Necrodelic, and then Morpheus Rex began to suck, imbibing dreams, spinal fluid, and blood. Some of the blood was his own, having already begun circulating through the flesh-smoker's veins and arteries. As Morpheus Rex suckled upon the Necrodelic's bodily fluids, the straws drove even deeper into the demon's black body, loosening his grip upon the Dreaming Predator. Morpheus Rex was able to disengage himself from the Necrodelic's clutches and, with the straws still stuck in the Necrodelic, used the Umbilicus to lift his nemesis into the air and bash him against the walls, floor, and ceiling. He continued to drink the Necrodelic's blood and dreams as he swung him around with the sorcerous straw apparatus. As he attempted to smash the Necrodelic into the ceiling yet again, the Necrodelic flipped over in mid-air and blocked the blow with his clawed feet. Using the ceiling for leverage, he launched himself at Morpheus Rex like a battering ram. He landed atop the Dreaming Predator and knocked him to the floor.

  With straws still sticking from a myriad of bleeding holes in his face, head, neck and back, the Necrodelic pummeled Morpheus Rex with fists like neutronium hammers, breaking the bones in his face and opening cracks in his skull like those wrought by earthquakes on solid ground, branching out in all directions from the main faultline.

  After beating Morpheus Rex into near-unconsciousness, the Necrodelic stood and loomed over the Dreaming Predator's prone body. Standing with his feet on either side of Morpheus Rex's chest, Chariah's lodged his curled talons in the Dreaming Predator's bloody armpits. Chariah then placed his palms together and turned his hands down, all ten claws joined together to form a single black broadsword. The Necrodelic was poised to deliver the deathblow, to drive all ten claws through Morpheus Rex's throat at once, point first, decapitating the Dreaming Predator. He held his hands at heart-level, as though in upside-down prayer.

  Morpheus Rex watched the tips of the claws gleaming above him. As they started to drop like a two-fisted sword being driven into the ground by its pommel, the Dreaming Predator bit down upon the mouthpiece of the Umbilicus and blew as hard as he could, emptying his lungs into the twisted straws. The air rushed through the myriad tubes and struck the Necrodelic in the chest like a gale force wind, blasting him into the air. As Chariah careened down the corridor his flesh jerked free of the Umbilicus. After he landed, he continued to roll and bounce for several feet before coming to a stop in a pool of his own blood and a bed of his own broken bones, lying in the center of a pentagrammed foyer, a hanging jungle of severed limbs dangling above, seeming to reach for him as he lay there in semi-consciousness.

  Morpheus Rex slowly got back to his feet and ran the short distance down the hall to his weapons gallery. He flung open the door and grabbed his Prismsword, Spectrumhammer, and Rainbowspear from
their racks. He turned and reentered the bloodstained hallway, but the Necrodelic was gone.

  Morpheus Rex raced to the foyer where he had seen the flesh-smoking demon lying in a broken heap. A crimson chiaroscuro etched the shape of the Necrodelic's body in blood upon the pentagram, but of the blood's master there was no sign.

  As Morpheus Rex puzzled over the disappearance of the Necrodelic, a huge noise, like an explosion, rumbled and thundered with ear-splitting crashings and unleashed a sonic quake through the air, shaking the very walls around him and jolting Phantasmagorika all the way from its foundation to its highest parapets. Morpheus Rex rushed to a window, but there was nought to be seen through the black flesh of the Omnibeast, which obscured everything and was, itself, quivering with the force of the sound.

  Holding his Prismsword aloft, Morpheus Rex made his way down the rampways of Phantasmagorika, at once searching for the Necrodelic and eager to reach the lower levels of the palace, those which were not usurped by the black body parts of the Omnibeast. The echoes of the earth-shaking noise were sonic booms, and the prism palace continued to vibrate and tremble as Morpheus Rex strode swiftly but cautiously down its stairways and corridors.

  The Dreaming Predator entered the gates of his drug garden and gazed through the transparent greenhouse walls. The back wall was a window to the south, and it was there, in the distance, that Morpheus Rex beheld the source of the thunderous sound. As he did so, he instinctively raised the Prismsword a few inches higher and tightened his grip on the Spectrumhammer, for what he observed upon the Grystiawan plains could mean only one thing.

  The war had begun.

  14

  The Constrictress soared through space atop a winged serpent. She held the large flying snake within her vast coils in much the same way she held prey or a lover, her emerald and obsidian scales wrapped around his thrice-arched body in continual loops. She controlled the flight of her ophidian steed by applying different levels of pressure with her coils, constricting him more tightly to increase his speed and loosening her grip to slow him down, and steered him by means of an iron choke-collar, leashed to her forked tongue by a single length of chain. The Constrictress reared up over the creature's head like a striking cobra, her massive, elongated arms, which were like boa constrictors unto themselves, coiled at her sides, ready to unleash death in an instant.

  Serpentikal flew at a slower speed behind his mistress and her fleet. The size of a palace, Serpentikal achieved the power of flight through his own psychic force. His elongated neck and gargantuan, hooded head protruded from the front of Serpentopolis, looming over his labyrinthine city/body as he dragged it behind him.

  The front walls of the labyrinth society brimmed with cannons and crossbows to either side of their titanic, living figurehead. Serpentine turrets and parapets encircled the perimeter of the city, and were manned by spitting vipers whose aim and range was such that they could expectorate a stream of venom into the eye of a creature a thousand miles away.

  The fleet of winged serpents and their riders, led by the Constrictress, scouted ahead while Serpentikal slithered through the cosmos, darting in and out and all around the dark voids of space while protecting the walls and the wake of Serpentopolis. Thousands of flying serpents soared and whirred around the battle fortress as the ophidian society traveled across the galaxy. As they reached the orbit of Tyterviax's seventh, outermost planet, a small, frozen ball of ice called Vrisstinoma, the Constrictress sent some of her fleet ahead and circled back to inform Serpentikal that they had entered the Tyterviax system. The great cobra hissed in acknowledgement, his tongue flickering like a bolt of lightning, and shifted the labyrinthine girth of his body towards Grystiawa. The Constrictress sped off again into the distance, swerving around asteroids and hurtling at light-speed towards the crimson star of bleeding light, the suppurating sore upon the cosmos that was Tyterviax.

  A few hours later, Serpentikal and his ophidian army loomed in the Grystiawan skies like a new moon. As preparations were made to land, the Constrictress came firing from unseen space to hover on her winged serpent, eye to eye with her colossal lover.

  "My lord," she said, with jaws that hinged and unhinged as she spoke, "Spidratha is descending towards Grystiawa as we speak. My scouts estimate the spider armies will arrive within the next few hours."

  "Excellent," hissed Serpentikal. "We shall wait for her here, in Grystiawa's orbit. When the spider palace drops into the system, report to me again. We shall strike first, here, in space. We shall strike suddenly, without warning and with deadly intent."

  "And we shall strike last, my lord," the Constrictress completed the ancient serpent proverb with a seductive reptilian smile, before speeding away again upon her winged snake.

  Behind her, the large, hooded head of Serpentikal was relaxed and content, enjoying the calm moments before battle the way a cobra enjoys the silent time before its deadly strike, or a boa constrictor enjoys a slow, weeks-long digestion in the tranquil period following a worthy combat.

  *

  The white, shimmering hive of Spidropolis descended through the cosmos upon a single, endless strand of cobweb, stretching into infinity above. Deep inside the spiderwebbed lair, Spidratha sat upon her throne of cadavers, surrounded by three giant tarantulas from her harem and a room full of arachnid strategists and overlords. The queen spoke to her entourage with a voice that scuttled through the air, a long series of the scrapings and rustlings which comprised the spider language.

  "I have positioned the nest directly above Grystiawa. We are descending as we speak, and shall fall into the Tyterviax system within the hour. Once we drop through Grystiawa's atmosphere, we will be landing Spidropolis in whichever mountain range is nearest to Phantasmagorika at that time. I want the mountains immediately covered with webbing, and the spider army ready to march upon the prism palace at my command. And now", Spidratha said, waving three of her arms towards her attendant mates, "I wish to be alone with my husbands. I must prepare myself for the battle to come."

  Upon these words, every spider except the three tarantulas departed the queen's chamber. Her two eight-legged sentinels spun a mass of solid webbing in the entrance tunnel, to give their mistress the solitude she required. Spidratha reached forward and grabbed the first tarantula with one hand. She placed him between her knees, whereupon he slowly crawled up her thighs and nestled over her black vagina, obscuring its entrance and looking as though he had become a prosthetic vagina for his queen in the process. He pumped his seed into the queen's cloaca, his eight legs stiffening like those of a corpse. Spidratha screeched with orgasm, and as she reached her climax. she brought one of her arms down like a spear upon her lover, impaling him through the back. Her appendage bore straight through her lover's body and tore through his abdomen, then, likewise, traveled between Spidratha's thighs and into her vagina alongside his turgid phallus. Moaning, Spidratha moved her arm up and down, masturbating with her black appendage even as it impaled her mate. She dragged her spider arm through her lover and her own genitalia simultaneously, squealing as she reached a second climax. When she stopped, the spider in her lap had died, perished at the exact same moment when he, too, had reached a second mutual orgasm. Spidratha raised her bloody arm to her fanged mouth with her dead lover still skewered upon it, then began chewing his flesh off, rotating his dead body slowly, crunching each of his legs between her teeth one by one, devouring him entirely, leaving her with blood dripping from her mandibles and a spider arm tipped in vivid crimson.

  Spidratha took another tarantula upon her bloody lap. As the male furiously copulated with his queen, she pounded his back with her six arms, raining blows repeatedly until her arachnid mate lay torn and dripping, eventually hammering his entire body past her labia and into her vagina as she achieved orgasm. She reached a bloody arm down and pushed him farther through her cloaca, through her spinnerets, through her egg sac, through her intestines, and into her stomach, where he would be digested alive with the remnants of the f
irst tarantula, which were just now beginning to rain down into the steaming acid lake from the dark tube above.

  Spidratha's arm was sunk to the hilt in her vagina, thrust all the way up into her digestive system. When she removed it, it was coated in blood and wreathed with spiderwebs. With this appendage, she grabbed her final tarantula lover by his thin tufts of brown hair and held him up to her lips. She kissed him, and when she did so, he could taste the other two spiders who had copulated and perished before him in her hot breath.

  Releasing her lips from her mate, Spidratha dragged him down her torso, between all eight of her breasts, running his body along the erogenous zone that was her red hourglass marking. She rubbed him up and down upon the crimson hourglass until she was in an orgasmic frenzy, then dropped the tarantula into her wet and waiting lap, where he spent his seed immediately into her vagina as she attained orgasm with him simultaneously.

  After a few moments of heavy breathing, Spidratha lifted her final lover of the evening by the fur once again. This time, she did not devour her mate raw, but placed him in a boiling cauldron beside her throne. As the tarantula was boiled alive, Spidratha added several drugs to the concoction, drugs that would heighten her senses and make her more formidable and bellipotent during the imminent warfare. She cooked the drugs together with the tarantula, his moist, softened flesh absorbing the stimulants and analgesics into his body. She withdrew the limp, wet spider meat from the cauldron and sprinkled a powdered psychedelic seasoning upon it. The drug, known as spiderdust, was made from mosquitoes that had siphoned the blood of manticores, tapeworms that had infested the entrails of basilisks, maggots that had eaten from the corpse of a dragon, and those rarest of all flies that carried malaria, bubonic plague, gonorrhea, and psychosis simultaneously.