by Brant Danay
The Oneirophage dreamt a threefold dream of himself as the Beast. First, he was the steed of Satan, forced through an endless cycle of death and reincarnation at the prodding of his omnipotent tamer's red-hot whip, riding him atop a flaming saddle as he recycled himself through space and time. Secondly, he dreamt that he was Satan's pet, his leash lit like the wick of a candle and continually burning down into his flesh but never being extinguished or destroyed, his mouth frothing with rabies and his guts churning with white-hot tapeworms, forced to sleep in an ensorcelled cage which prevented dreams. Last, he dreamt he was Satan's livestock, forced to eat and drink dreams from a trough, his nipples and penises milked daily for the blood that Satan drank, and then one day finding himself laid out, while still alive, upon a banquet table as Satan casually devoured him, plucking out organs one by one with a fork, scooping out brains with a spoon, and carving the flesh from his bones with a butcher knife to devour raw. His blood dribbled down Satan's beard while his body was eaten piece by piece, and then his bones were picked clean while he watched helplessly, and he could feel every mutilated body part and every morsel of meat being masticated in Satan's mouth, could feel every bolus of flesh swallowed to free fall through the abysses of his esophagi, and then burned and dissolved in the boiling digestive acids of his infernal stomachs. He could still feel his own flesh as it was being broken down into nutrients, and then he could feel each individual cell that used to comprise his body being put to use in the various parts of Satan's anatomy. His body completely absorbed into Satan's, his soul was then sugared and salted, covered in spices and saturated in wine, and then Satan swallowed his very spirit whole, and everything went black.
*
The Oneirophage awoke with salt in his burning eyes and his open wounds, and realized that he was not awake. The dream salt regenerated itself like a virus and soon suffused his entire body, inside and out, and began dissolving parts of his soul. The iron maidens of dream constricted tighter around his mind's eyes. Winged instincts flew around frantically in his head until their pinions were broken, then jumped out his ears, committing suicide. Memories then did the same, making their death plunges from his eyes. Archetypes lined up in single file on his tongues and one by one, like lemmings, leapt to their deaths from his mouth to the abyss below. Serpents and spiders, succubi with phalluses for noses and fanged mouths for vaginas, castrated incubi with severed penises in hand, nightworms eternally devouring their own tails, a leprous king with his young virgin princess impaled on his penis, the fanged fetus of a prince raping a terminally ill queen upon her wheeled deathbed, a bloody maggot pushing a sarcophagus occupied by the corpse of a fly, a bloody caterpillar pushing a coffin filled with the cadaver of a butterfly, a demon holding the ashes of his brother in the cup of his hands, a soliloquizing philosopher on a torture rack, a winged harpy singing siren songs on a crucifix, a hydra in a multiple guillotine and his demon executioner, a thousand-armed demon being drawn and thousandthed by a thousand and two dragons, and finally Satan himself, marched in a cortege along the lengths of his tongues to the rim of his lips, and then committed suicide by jumping to the hard darkness far below, where they splattered and stained the black ground with mandalas, symbols, sigils, labyrinths, and optical illusions. The Oneirophage then himself committed suicide, gnawing at the silver cord of his astral body like a wolf, chewing his own soul free from the trap of his flesh like a desperate animal would gnaw off its own leg to escape from a snare. He bit through the silver cord and toppled to the hard black bottom of the bottomless abyss, spilling his blood and soul amongst the gory stains of the others who had gone before. Overhead, in the sable skies, loomed the ethereal busts of the Necrodelic and Mother Chaos, their top halves visible amongst the stars as they smiled with mysterious pride before disappearing.
When he awoke, he was The Labyrinth, the seducer of sanity, luring demons into its twisted body with promises that the first to solve the maze would become the Jh'a'vyraa. It spied the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage amongst the hundreds who entered its flesh, saw its dark soulmates wandering its depths and writhings. The lost demons were red-hot, as painful as lava pouring through the circulatory system of The Labyrinth. The Labyrinth saw the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage come to the end of itself simultaneously and await their destinies. First Mother Chaos appeared and carried the Necrodelic off in her winged embrace like a child. Then, the very surgery which was its nightmare reared up with red-hot scalpels and tongs, and Satan the unholy surgeon performed a diabolical and excruciating sex change upon the Oneirophage. He then raped the universe's newest female, impregnating the castrated and wombed Oneirophage with demon serpentling children, who would forever wander The Labyrinth in search of salvation, each a fragment of the Oneirophage's consciousness.
The Labyrinth wept to death...
...and he became The Ocean, a cesspool of every tear ever wept, coagulating at the bottom of the universe. The Necrodelic and Mother Chaos made love in the firmament far above, at the prodding of Satan the Breeder and his flaming spears, tridents, and branding irons. The melancholy of orgasm caused the Necrodelic's penis to weep sperm, which fell through the cosmos to land in The Ocean with tortured sighs. The whole universe warred above The Ocean, spilling all the blood it possessed until The Ocean turned red and crimson and mermaids and sirens emerged from its depths. Somewhere in The Ocean, a heart beat, creating rhythmic, sanguine tides. The mermaids and sirens sang dirges and threnodies in the vermilion waters.
Suddenly there was a thunderbolt, and then a small splash in the crimson sea. It was The Oneirophage, betrayed by his own dreams and sent plummeting to The Ocean, where he immediately swam off in search of someone's heart, someone whose identity he did not know. In the distance, amid the scarlet surf, the crimson mermaids seductively called. A second thunderbolt was followed by an enormous splash, this time raising tsunamis of blood in The Ocean. The Omnibeast had been shot down from the starlit skies of outer space, by the flaming arrow of Satan in his Sagittary incarnation, and crashed into the churning sea of blood.
The Oneirophage swam back from the horizon now and climbed atop the Omnibeast as though it were an island, floating in the middle of The Ocean whose shores had never been glimpsed and probably did not exist, unless they were, perhaps, the very edges of time and space. The Oneirophage lay down atop the Omnibeast while the bestial spaceship drifted, half-submerged in The Ocean, and then all three went to sleep simultaneously.
The Oneirophage could telesthetically perceive the Omnibeast's sensations as he slumbered. The stains of the bestial spaceship's black and crimson ichor were on his rainbow lips, as well as the rim of the Umbilicus he clutched to his chest in his right hand. He began to sense, now, through the dreaming spaceship, the gentle caresses of Mother Chaos and the Necrodelic, healing the Omnibeast's burns and luring it back to health from the fires which had been blown through its insides. He felt the touch of Mother Chaos on the astral plane, trying to assauge the spaceship's fears and massage away its nightmares. The Oneirophage trembled at the touch of Mother Chaos as he felt it through the Omnibeast. The Dreaming Predator desired the Mistress of Entropy for his own, and would one day claim her as his bride over the corpse of the Necrodelic.
Just the very thought of the Necrodelic was enough to summon his presence, and now the two stood face to face on the astral plane, sharing a spiritual crossroads with Mother Chaos and the Omnibeast. Their eye contact lasted for several infinite moments before each returned to their bodies, and in that eye contact was the raw stuff of vendetta. The battlefield shifted then to the physical dimension, to the labyrinths of the Omnibeast, where demons played. The psychic wars were, for the moment, over, but there would come a reckoning day in the future where the astral plane would once again be their battlefield, in a spiritual combat where dreams were both blood and weapons, and consciousness itself was the trophy.
21
The phantom of the Oneirophage floated somnambulantly through the crumbling corridors, floor
s turning to ash in his wake and old smoke dissipating in the passages. While he slept, his dreams were like werewolves, stalking him and cornering him in the recesses of his own brain before transforming back into intelligent life forms beneath the dawn's light of reason. He cowered at the fringes of his consciousness, hung by loose visceral strings over the abyss of his own mortality as if swinging over Hell by his own guts. When he was disturbed, his specter traveled the fire-blasted wing of the spaceship like a senescent lunatic, muttering to itself, and he longed for the very dreams which haunted him in slumber. But, when he made his way towards the dungeons to gather new dreams, he found every way sealed, not only physically, but with astral barricades and spells of warding as well, no doubt by the touch of the Necrodelic at the ship's control center. The Oneirophage resorted to licking the black flesh of the spaceship, plunging his straw into its cracked and immolated walls and sucking up ash. The cells of the tunnel had yet to repair themselves from the Necrodelic's controlled fire, and their fibers had yet to recollect their genetic knowledge and intelligence. Thus, the wandering shade of the Oneirophage found itself without dreams to devour and returned to its slumbering flesh, settling itself back into its embryonically curled body.
Some of his older dreams began slowly overtaking the nightmares. Buried too deep in his consciousness, they did not provide him with the sustenance he craved, and thus he succumbed once more to nightmares, preferring them to dreamlessness, his addiction such that even their malefic assuagings were preferable to not dreaming at all.
The Oneirophage trembled during his hypnogogic ordeals, his flesh jumping in little spots as if it sought to commit suicide by plunging from its own self into the abyss of bodilessness. His muscles quivered like a liquid musical instrument, carrying notes of pain and nausea. He wept in his sleep, yet, paradoxically, frequently ejaculated from both erect penises, aroused into the sadomasochistic tangle of pain, sex, and dream that defined his very essence.
The Oneirophage became euphoric with nightmare. The raw surges of paranoia had made a toy of his nauseated guts, as if to play a game of evisceration with Satan. Lifted out of his body and jerked into a state of higher consciousness, the Oneirophage could feel Satan ready to play that game of evisceration, ready to play with his every organ as though each were a piece in that twisted game.
Satan laughed, his voice reverberating through the spaceship halls and sending the specter of the Oneirophage scurrying back once more to its physical body. The Oneirophage broke through the membranes leading to his sanctuary and climbed once more into the pustule that sheltered his slumbering form, blistered into existence when the Necrodelic had besieged the halls with flame. Curled up in white viscous fluid to his chest, the Oneirophage shuddered and sweated.
The Oneirophage lay in the fetal position, and his surroundings slowly took on the air of a womb, a pus-filled womb. The Oneirophage regressed, was ready to meet his death as the child he had once been, the fetus who had sucked sludge through an umbilical cord, the fanged serpentling who had sucked milk and blood from a nipple, the demonling whose first kill had been the slaying of his own mother, after which he had sucked the dreams from her every orifice and wound. He fingered his straw as cramps overtook him, combining with nausea to abrade him from the inside out. The heat was unbearable. The pus was like a boiling fountain of youth, a pool of innocence regained at the moment of doom. Satan's image filled his mind. The master of the universe reached for the Oneirophage's soul with one externally veined and arteried hand, his red-hot fingernail puncturing his consciousness, sending thoughts flying like debris in excruciating rainbows through his brain.
"Come, my child..." spoke Satan, "This incarnation has proven futile. ..You are the underdemon... you are dead... you are mine..."
A crimson eye filled the air in the womb as the hot claw stroked his consciousness, and then the face of Satan coalesced around it.
The Oneirophage clung to his last dream, his final dream, his ultimate dream, the dream of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa.
"You are no Jh'a'vyraa... Behold...You have never even escaped your mother's womb..."
The Oneirophage held his straw with twitching fingers and tried to suckle upon the eye, but found it ephemeral as mist. The Umbilicus passed right through the floating death's head of Satan and lodged itself in the living flesh of the wall behind it. Instinctively, the Oneirophage began to drink. The Omnibeast had been healed by the thaumaturgies of Mother Chaos, the fires extinguished, the flesh of the sentient spaceship cleansed. After hours of tortured sleep in the incandescent blister, drenched in the night sweats from the boiling temperatures, suffering from massive smoke inhalation and dreaming in heat shimmers and mirages, the Oneirophage was finally able to drink fresh, pure dreams rather than ashes, memories, and agony. Strength poured back into him, filling his muscles, suffusing his scales and skin like armor, balancing his brainwaves, and assuaging his soul. Satan laughed once again and then faded.
The Oneirophage drank his fill of the Omnibeast's various dreams and then splashed back against the side of the pus-filled womb, the wall of the spaceship's blister, and gazed out through the transparent membranes at the healthy pulp of healed corridors and passageways. The scenery was beautiful to his dream-drugged mind. He knew, however, that there was no time to enjoy it, for the Necrodelic had discovered his ruse and tracked his exact location. This he had divined by unremembered methods while he slept, half-dead from the smoke inhalation and the scorching heat, in the tenebrous sanctuary of the blister-womb, while infernos raged all around.
The Oneirophage arose on his serpent's tail and slithered over the grey and black corpses littering the small alcove that had been burned into the wall. Their limbed, dried husks were ashen and mummified, some crumbling to dust as he passed over them. The Dreaming Predator burst through the black membrane of the giant blister, the only part of the spaceship that had been left unhealed, as a suppurating landmark to reveal his exact location. Pus dripped from the ceiling as he tore through the thin veils of skin, and then the Oneirophage was free of the accursed antechamber, though still a prisoner within the Omnibeast. Snaking through the corridors, the Oneirophage plotted his next attack.
*
"Sweet evil-ling, you are nothing but a maggot, a maggot in the feces of my sperm...Your doom draweth nigh...I will collect your soul..."
Satan haunted Chariah like a telepathic vampire, planting words in his vulnerable consciousness and irrigating his brain with razor-fangs and a barbed phallus. Chariah forced his laughing overlord away with a singular push of consciousness, like a sexual thrust, aided from beyond by Mother Chaos.
The Necrodelic hunted. To the wing of his bestial spaceship where the Oneirophage lay in waiting he purposefully strode, clad in black onyx armor and armed with a black onyx broadsword and a black onyx shield. He wore a horned helmet over his head, through which his crimson eyes glowed. Large spikes upon his shoulders complemented the horned helmet. His long ebon claws protruded from holes in the gauntlets that covered his fists. A black dragonskin scabbard hung from his waist. A necro-compass was bolted around his left forearm, pointing him towards his prey. He followed its throbbing dial now and came upon the remnants of the Oneirophage's brief sanctuary, a giant burst blister in the wall of the corridor which was still leaking pus. Inside, the temporary shelter was filled with demon ashes and half-cremated corpses riddled with unholy perforations.
The Oneirophage had fled, leaving the gargantuan blister behind like shed skin. The Necrodelic glanced down at the necro-compass bolted to his gauntlet, and followed its direction as its flesh-magnets pointed him toward potential death. Brandishing his onyx broadsword, Chariah stalked the Oneirophage through the labyrinth, cutting off escape routes and hounding the Dreaming Predator. Confused and lost, the Oneirophage soon found himself cornered in a dead end with the Necrodelic fast approaching. He opened an iron trapdoor in the fleshy floor and dropped onto a catwalk fifty feet below. He landed on his resilient, coiling serpent's tail
and looked to either side. The narrow span led to two different portcullises. One of them was opening.
The sound of chains unraveling and clanging to the floor reverberated in the giant cylindrical chamber. The portcullis was raised, a black adamantium grille stuck like bondage prosthetics into the crimson flesh of the spaceship. A moment later, the Necrodelic stepped forth from the darkness, blackly resplendent in his raven armor, the edge of his onyx sword gleaming even though its blade was more caliginous than midnight. The portcullis dropped behind him, sinking into the flesh of the ground with a splattering of blood, the iron grate impaling the living spaceship.
The Oneirophage drank in his surroundings. The two of them stood atop a series of bridges made of black adamantium. The narrow catwalks were suspended over a reservoir of blood, whose surface was hundreds of feet below and of indeterminate depths. The reservoir was thousands of feet in circumference, an enormous storehouse of precious blood, the largest amount of blood owned by any individual demon in the entire universe. It was the result of millions of sacrificial victims, and easily the largest room in the entire spaceship, a stark contrast to the asceticism found throughout the rest of the vessel. The catwalks were part of an intricate series of iron bridges, balconies, platforms, and stairways, some balustraded, some not, that stretched like spiderwebs all throughout the reservoir. The Oneirophage was unable to perceive the entire intricacy of the complicated architecture in the murky gloom. Levers and cranks were sparsely interspersed upon the walls and platforms. There were hidden machines and engines at work within the reservoir; they could be heard pumping and churning the blood far below, purifying it and directing it through the circulatory systems of the Omnibeast. There were several hearts beating in the chamber as well, and some of them did not sound as though they were mechanical.