by Brant Danay
The Constrictress lay sobbing by Serpentikal's severed head, bent over with grief, her powerful coils slack with despair. Around her, all of the serpent demons were retreating into Serpentopolis. Morpheus Rex continued the battle, beating giant tarantulas into the ground, carving up spidaurs, and then decimating everything else until just he and Spidratha stood upon the battlefield.
She cast her net towards him. It fell heavily around him, as solid as adamantium even though it was made from spiderweb. She assaulted him with her giant whip, opening gaping wounds where she could catch his flesh exposed in the mesh of the battle-net. She drew Morpheus Rex to her, dragging him across the corpse-strewn ground.
The Dreaming Predator fought his way free of the battle net, only to be struck forcefully in the side by the full brunt of the spiked war-pike. Spidratha aimed her barbed wire-wrapped broadsword at his head. He blocked it with his Prismsword, then swung his Spectrumhammer in an uppercut towards her crotch, bludgeoning her vagina and thorax. She jabbed her pike at him as he ran between her legs, then caught him with a double-jointed backhanded blow of her blade while he simultaneously thrust the Prismsword into her back. The barbed wire caught at Morpheus Rex's flesh even as the blade tore into his skull. When Spidratha swung the blade back, the barbed wire ripped out pieces of Morpheus Rex's skin and hair. Spidratha turned, and swung her pike in a high overhanded arc. Morpheus Rex again darted between her legs, but this time her cloaca released a mass of sticky spiderweb, catching him completely within its viscous clutches. He writhed on the sand like an invertebrate, unable to get to his feet with the web clinging to every part of his body, wrapping him in a cocoon of bondage.
Spidratha poked her pike into the net, lifting the spiderweb and her prey by the crossed mesh of her secretions. Morpheus Rex was forced into a fetal position by the tight clutches of webbing. Spidratha raised him to her crotch, and then began masturbating with her captured prey, shoving his entire body between her labia and in and out of her womb. Morpheus Rex fought the entire time, sinking fangs full of venom into her vaginal walls, severing one of her clitorises with an awkward swipe of his Prismsword, clawing at her insides with his long fingernails and then driving the Umbilicus into her organs as well. The pain only seemed to heighten her sexual enjoyment, and Spidratha began to tremble with mighty, bloody orgasms, shuddering with small sensual explosions.
She dragged the netted Morpheus Rex dripping from her womb and raised him, spiderwebs, weapons, and all, to her mandibles. Her mouth opened to devour him, the same way she devoured all her lovers, but something caught her glassy eyes, and she hesitated. In the distance, Chariah had emerged from the Serpentopolis, holding the Constrictress over his head. As Spidratha watched, the Necrodelic began to bend and twist the ophidian virago in his hands, breaking her arms and snapping her spine.
"You have served me well, demon," spake Spidratha. "Together we have conquered the serpent race."
Chariah did not respond, but continued folding the still-living Constrictress, her bones breaking loudly, her vertebrae exploding.
"I will take you for my lover, Necrodelic."
Violently wrenching the body of the Constrictress into sharply pointed angles, splintering her skeleton into several pieces, the Necrodelic replied, "And devour me, like all the rest."
"Thee I shall spare. We will rule the universe together. As soulmates, we will become the Jh'a'vyraa. I will sacrifice anything to possess you. I will give you sexual pleasures undreamt of. I will give you anything you desire, anything in the entire universe. Tell me, sweet demonling, what it is that you desire?"
Chariah manipulated the decimated body of the Constrictress like an invertebrate in his fists, grasping her by the head and twisting her one last time. He slowly held the Constrictress up to his face with both hands. He had sculpted her into a living pentagram. Her eyes were wild with agony and necrophobia, knowing her demise was imminent.
"Fire," he finally replied, blowing a jetstream of flames through the living pentagram of the Constrictress, unleashing a tsunami of fire the likes of which had never been seen beyond Hell. Amplified by the sorcery of the living pentagram, the inferno reached thousands of feet into the skies and miles into the distance. It tore through Spidratha, blowing her eight legs asunder, disintegrating her abdomen and thorax, lifting her head high into the air on a giant crest of flames where it all at once blackened, shriveled, and exploded. Her dying shriek pierced the entire planet, was heard in distant solar systems, and would continue to echo until the end of the universe in certain black holes.
Chariah cast the deformed, scorched corpse of the Constrictress to the ground. For a moment he reveled in the familiar euphoria of pyromania and the newfound ecstasy of betrayal. He then ran back toward Phantasmagorika and his spaceship perched thereon, yelling "Drakhus" as he did so, for there was little time before the Hell he had unleashed would incinerate and then detonate the entire planet. Already the mountain ranges in the near distance had been leveled. The long tongue of the Overdragon reached down and bore its master up. A few moments later, the Omnibeast began to detach and disengage itself from the Prism Palace, preparing to launch itself into space.
As the Omnibeast began to lift into the sky, Morpheus Rex slowly crawled out of the Darkprism. The sable pendant had fallen to the ground as Spidratha was blown apart, and the Dreaming Predator had hidden himself within its depths a mere instant before. The flames of Hellfire were still raging, a gargantuan tsunami that would circumnavigate the entire planet within minutes. He drenched himself in his own venom to protect himself from the roiling fire and its blistering heat, then did his best to extinguish the flames around him by blowing through the Umbilicus, cutting himself a safe path to Phantasmagorika. He ran across the drawbridge and through the heliotropic gates, hoping that his breeding sorceries had worked.
Morpheus Rex tore through the palace, making his way towards its central chamber. If the chamber had metamorphosed into a cockpit, he would survive. If it had not, he would perish in Hellfire. Throwing open the door, Morpheus Rex stepped into the room. There was an oracle on the ceiling. There was a bed upon the floor. And there were umbilical cords reaching out from the circular walls. His breeding sorceries had worked. He had successfully used the Omnibeast to impregnate and fertilize the prism palace. Phantasmagorika was pupating, and would soon evolve into a living, saurian spaceship.
He gazed into the oracle on the ceiling and watched the tsunamis of fire overwhelm the twilit Grystiawan horizons, cresting and falling and rising again, sending billowing black cumulus smoke all the way into outer space. As he watched Tyterviax set for the final time, he transformed once again into the Oneirophage. Using the umbilical cords attached to his body, he invaded the Omnibeast above with Phantasmagorika's tentacles, wriggling into the black flesh of the vessel like gargantuan larvae, hopelessly knotting and tangling them with the bestial spaceship's Arachniotics, entrails, and genitalia, and thus forcing it to carry Phantasmagorika into outer space along with it. After a brief hesitation, during which the Necrodelic had, undoubtedly, assessed the situation and realized he had no alternative, the Omnibeast launched into the atmosphere, lifting Phantasmagorika from its chasm and into the air. Gargantuan, newborn butterfly wings emerged from four corners of the prism palace's outside walls, helping to carry the castle into the sky.
The Oneirophage watched Grystiawa pass by in his oracle. He saw below the rising palace the dead bodies of Serpentikal and the Constrictress. Though the maze city itself was in need of much reparation, the labyrinthine coils of Serpentikal were still largely intact, while Serpentikal's head had been cleanly severed, and could be easily reattached and reanimated. Yes, the Oneirophage decided, Serpentikal would make a nice figurehead for his pupating spaceship.
He held the Darkprism up to the oracle, sucking Serpentikal, labyrinth, snake demons and all, into its infinite depths. He absorbed the singed and broken, pentagram-twisted corpse of the fallen Constrictress as well. She had appeared in several of his
wet dreams in the past, sexual fantasies he would like to transform into realities, and he was not averse to necrophilia.
As Phantasmagorika lifted into space, the Oneirophage watched the flames consume Grystiawa below. He saw the Hellfire summoned by the Necrodelic light the planet like a small star, then watched Grystiawa explode like a supernova. He watched as the red lights of Tyterviax turned inwards, and the sun he had watched rise and set his entire life collapsed into a black hole. He lay there for several minutes, in silent meditation, and then slipped into the astral plane.
16
The freshly murdered spider queen crawled towards Hell along her silver cord, and the dreaming slayer serpent followed. Spidratha had abandoned her upright, bow-legged gate to crawl through the astral plane on all eight legs, like a common spider, humiliated, defeated, beaten into submission. The Oneirophage, seeking one last domination, one final degradation of the spider queen before her soul descended to Hell, launched his astral body at her spirit, intercepting her with such force that it sent them both ricocheting across entire galaxies. The violent collision broke three of Spidratha's legs and left them dangling at grotesque angles, whipping around as they sped through the voids, but never snapping off. A fourth leg impaled the Oneirophage through the palm, and its lower half twitched where it emerged in a crimson spray on the back of his hand. At the moment the Oneirophage had made contact, Spidratha had sunk her pincers into his guts, where one had broken off and lay entrenched in a coil of entrails. The Oneirophage, meanwhile, grabbed the arachnid succubus by the head with one hand, driving his thumb through several of her black ommatidia, shattering them like fragile obsidian, to fall in ebony shards through the cosmos below. He hooked his thumb into the pulp of her brain, digging out a fingerhold within the bleeding tissue. Gripping Spidratha thusly from the inside, and by the dark fur of her neck and shoulders on the outside, the Oneirophage rode beneath her, dominating her as though she were his submissive demonsteed. With her breasts striking him in the face as they swung pendulously back and forth, and her red hourglass filling his kaleidoscopic vision, the Oneirophage rode Spidratha across the cosmos, hanging on to her underbelly as she scuttled like some mutant offspring or giant parasite through the astral plane, trailing free-floating ribbons of blood in their wake.
Struggling for position, the Oneirophage mounted Spidratha in a grotesque upside-down parody of bestial rape, even as the spider demoness released her venom into his carotid artery. The poison only served to heighten the Oneirophage's dream-drugged state, to further enhance his consciousness and his oneiromantic powers. With the crimson of blood and the clear runnels of venom dripping from their entangled, flying bondage, the Oneirophage and Spidratha hurtled through the universe. They passed through an entire solar system as the Oneirophage swung his Prismsword, leaving behind it a rainbow millions of miles long. Its edge passed through Spidratha's silver cord of spiderweb, severing their connection to the fabric of space and time and sending them spinning in chaotic revolutions through the atmosphere of a planet's astral body.
They struggled for position as they fell, each gaining the upper position three times as they hurtled downwards. Spidratha's broken legs snapped where they had been fractured, and fell alongside them in the streaming cloud of blood and gore which accompanied their plummeting combat. As they neared the planet's surface, gravity pulling them in greedily like some titanic necrophage, Spidratha assumed the dominant position for the fourth time, seeking now to trap the Oneirophage against her hairy, eight-breasted, red-hourglassed underbelly. Her remaining pincer had the Oneirophage impaled through the roof of his mouth, and did not relent even as his three forked tongues shattered her remaining eyes. The Oneirophage thrashed in Spidratha's grip as the ground drew ever closer. Spidratha used her remaining legs to impale him through his lower back, two of them simultaneously skewering his kidneys as well, her legs passing through his body and then into her own, holding him fast as they plummeted. As the Oneirophage writhed against his captor, he managed to free his sword hand. He swung the Prismsword at the giant spider, slashing her entire left flank apart, but was unable to loosen her grasp or reverse his position. With his prismatic eyes, he looked down. They were within seconds of striking the planet. With one last muscle-tearing wrench of his arm, he brought the Prismsword around his back and plunged it beneath his own ribs. A second later, the Oneirophage and the spider hit the pulverizing ground of the planet.
The Prismsword impaled the Oneirophage through the back. It had been positioned along his right side to miss his spine, and more importantly, his heart. The Prismsword did not, however, miss the heart of Spidratha. As chitinous body armor shattered and fell like breaking glass around them, the Prismsword clove directly through the center of the spider demoness's heart. Blood exploded. Spidratha slid down the razor edges of the blade at light speed, severing the breast over her heart and further lengthening her own wound as the sword widened toward its hilt. As her three severed legs fell to the ground with tinkling sounds beside them, Spidratha heaved, vomiting blood and venom into the Oneirophage's face, and discharged her remaining coils of spiderweb in one gigantic, bloodstained, gore-strewn labyrinth.
The Oneirophage's battered body was trapped beneath the tonnage of Spidratha, but more importantly, she was impaled upon his Prismsword, paralyzed, trapped, as helpless as her myriad victims had been within her webs over the eons, as subjugated as all the former lovers she had raped and then devoured. The Oneirophage squirmed painfully beneath his defeated prey. His right arm, still clutching the hilt of the Prismsword, was pinned behind his back. His elbow was shattered, and jagged bones were ripping through his flesh and into the dirt below. His ribs were broken, his skull split, his pelvis pulverized. He still had a spider leg stuck through his left hand like a spear, and a pincer buried somewhere in his chaotically disarranged guts. The other pincer had severed his carotid artery upon impact, which now spurted blood in crimson arches up to ten feet in the distance. The vomited venom was eating his face like acid, and he was blinded with eye sockets full of spider blood.
Empowered by this world of astral agony, for pain was another one of his lairs, the Oneirophage spoke a single, musical word of sorcery. At his call, the Umbilicus came alive in his hands, forming labyrinths of tubes that stuck out in all directions around his body, cauterizing his wounds and mending his bones. The Oneirophage then used it like a straw to drink the dreams from Spidratha's ruined head and gaping, dripping injuries, renewing his strength and repairing his broken body with the sorcery of the psychedelic dreams on which he depended. Like a vampire, he imbibed life for himself from the death of his victim. Within minutes, the Oneirophage was once again at full power. Then, the ritual began.
The Oneirophage bade the Umbilicus to metamorphose again. It changed to a giant needle in his hand. Their bodies still impaled together by the Prismsword, the Oneirophage plunged the Umbilicus into Spidratha's red hourglass marking, sucking it from her flesh as though removing it with a scalpel. The Oneirophage then plunged the red-tipped needle into his left, spider-tattooed hand. The large needle hummed and vibrated, and when he removed the Oneirophage had a crimson hourglass tattooed upon his palm.
He penetrated the remains of Spidratha's astral body again, loading the needle with her blood, brains, venom, hormones, webbing, and dreams, and then imbuing his left hand with the bodily fluids and substances. Partaking of Spidratha until his entire left hand was midnight black, until his left hand bore pincers and dark fur, venomous fangs and a spider-web producing abdomen, the Oneirophage's left hand was sorcerously transformed into a living black widow. Where before he had borne a lifeless tattoo, he now adorned a wriggling, venomous, conscious familiar, a sentient spider gauntlet. The Oneirophage used the Umbilicus to gather up what remained of Spidratha's eyes, and tattooed them upon his knuckles. The black widow writhed and wriggled at the end of his arm as the power of sight was bestowed upon it. The Dreaming Predator gathered up the trio of severed legs that had fallen aro
und them, severing and then inserting their tips into the flesh upon the sides of his hand like thin daggers. Within seconds, they twitched with renewed vigor, renewed life. Now, with his new eight-fingered hand, he broke the tips off of Spidratha's remaining five appendages, and one by one, plunged his fingers into their wet, dripping, scarlet ends, adorning them like a gruesome glove.
Once joined to his flesh and having absorbed his fingers within them, the spider legs came to life again, and one by one, the five fingers of his left hand became giant, hairy, living, creeping appendages that were a hybrid of tarantula and black widow. Along with the other three, they formed the eight legs of the complete, breathing, sentient spider which his left hand had become.
Simultaneously, on the physical plane, while the Oneirophage slumbered, his left hand grew three extra fingers, which then blackened and transformed into spider legs. His other fingers parted in the middle of his hand, to form the exact replica of a black widow. Upon his palm, a red hourglass of blood slowly seeped through the black flesh, usurping the hourglass tattoo which had previously adorned it. While the Oneirophage slumbered, the black widow tattoo of his left hand came to life and began crawling up and down his side, along his chest, across his face and over his genitals, its mandibles clicking, dripping venom upon its somnolent master.
In the astral dimension, as he lay back against the bloodstained rocks of the sacrificial grounds, the Oneirophage pulled the Prismsword loose from his impaled victim, at long last releasing Spidratha's spirit from his possession. No more than a blind, legless, bloody piece of meat, she wriggled and squirmed her way to Hell like a grub, denigrated and mutilated, to finally take her place in the afterlife.
The Oneirophage awoke several hours later. Flexing his new eight-fingered spiderhand, the Oneirophage arose, and feasted upon a breakfast of spiderflesh and spider's organs from the corpses and half-dead, mutilated arachnids strewn across his bed and about his bedchamber, gathered up by the Darkprism from the Grystiawan battlefield the day before. As he sipped upon a concoction of blood and venom from a goblet made out of prism, the Oneirophage walked the changing corridors of Phantasmagorika. The prism palace continued to metamorphose into a living spaceship around him, larvating, pupating, and incubating; growing, adapting, and evolving; reproducing itself through mitosis and spreading itself like cancer while it soared through the cosmos, still attached to the Omnibeast like a parasitic embryo or gargantuan intergalactic remora, its unwilling host bearing it in its underbelly as it transformed.