by Brant Danay
As the dreams burrowed like tiny predators into his consciousness, he was overcome with the sensation of swimming to someone's heart, until he could not, at certain moments, distinguish the dream from reality. He was borne through the maze, and he sometimes saw crimson mermaids around the corners ahead, but they had always disappeared by the time he reached them.
Gradually the blood began to heat, slowly turning lethal at the influence of the Necrodelic, who lurked somewhere in the upper realms of the Omnibeast and was no doubt hooked into the spaceship's nervous system again in an attempt to destroy him. As the already naturally warm blood grew hotter, the Oneirophage was occupied by the ever-changing labyrinth. He frequently had to decide between up to ten different passages in a split second, for that was all the time the rushing currents of blood allowed. To choose erroneously could mean injury or fatality. There were no dead ends in this labyrinth, but there were plenty of pitfalls, traps, and killing machines.
There were no patterns either, no order to the tunnels whatsoever, nothing to help one comprehend the intricate twistings and windings. It was a labyrinth of chaos. Dodging giant meat grinders was a matter of timing, slowing down or speeding up to dive through the holes that opened briefly before the blades irised shut again. A giant liquifier loomed ahead, a hideous machine that looked like it would turn the Oneirophage's flesh into colored water. He took a detour through some septic tanks, acquiring malaria and syphilis as he did so. He sucked the sudden chancres from his penis with the Umbilicus and blew them into the crimson wake behind him. The malaria he forced out with one powerful pneuma, the winds of which caused whirlpools and waterspouts in the rivers of blood.
The sound of trash compactors crashing shut echoed in the distance. Farther on, the Oneirophage observed the garbage spilling from those trash compactors into liquifying machines. As he watched the giant iron contraptions do their work, he realized that he had been correct in his earlier theory that the liquifiers would turn him to water. Not viscous sludge. Not dripping slime. Not even cannibal's wine. Water. Pure, monochromatic, odorless, soulless, crystal-clear water.
The streams and lakes of plasma had heated to the point where they bubbled as the Oneirophage drifted onwards. Floodgates were opening to increase the blood flow, and the currents bore the Oneirophage on their crimson waves at even faster speeds than before. He washed through some of the floodgates, being sprayed into the air like cataract foam and landing in the blood far below, where he was whisked away again. He traveled sideways in a curving tube against the bulge of the Omnibeast's underbelly. He could hear and taste the cosmos just outside, could feel the passage of solar systems in his serpent glands. Chutes into outer space began opening along the rim, shafts both short and long spewing wreckage and organic detritus into the interstellar voids. The Oneirophage exhaled continuously through the Umbilicus to maintain equal pressurization with the vacuums and avoid a similar fate.
Finally, the now-steaming blood deposited him into the lower digestive, reproductive, and excretory systems of the Omnibeast. The giant, living, pulsing organs of the Omnibeast were multitudinous and resembled fungus demons. The veins and arteries of the spaceship ran directly through their throbbing masses. They were unavoidable and carnivorous, and he would have to go directly through them.
Each one tried to devour him. A black liver reached out with spongy hands as he sailed its dank caverns, stealing scales and trying to dig its fingers into his flesh to get at the chemicals within. The Oneirophage fought them off as he traveled through. One hand stole a fang while another stole a spider leg from his arachnid hand, then a third ripped off one of his eyelids. Others seemed intent on milking the fluids from his body, dark spongy hands masturbating him for his sperm, sticking their fingers in his mouth for venom, and dabbing up blood from his wounds, then absconding back into their pulpy depths with the precious chemicals. The Oneirophage left many of the soft hands floating in their own veins and arteries before the currents of blood finally bore him onward.
Kidneys tried to liquify his flesh, passing him through valve after valve, filter after filter, collecting his sweat and blood but unable to turn him into fluids with their weak tissues. They poured salt on him as he exited, corrosive salt that burned his eyes and open wounds, and like some form of acid stinging the parts of his body that weren't injured or exposed.
The intestines were mazes unto themselves, from which many would never escape, would wander through eternally from dead end to dead end, or in circle after circle, until death or the end of time. They were pitch black inside, as well as completely devoid of sound. The Oneirophage cursed and could not hear his voice. He splashed the rivers of blood around him, and listened to silence. Blind, deaf, and mute, he would have to solve the labyrinth with only his senses of touch, smell, taste, and psychic abilities, and those esoteric perceptions known only to serpents through their specialized glands and pits. He waded through blood, felt his way around ribbony corridors with his black widow hand and his bleeding right stump, using venom to mark where he'd been and attempting to use the holes over his fangs to determine a basic outline or map of the visceral maze. After several hours of wandering, as senseless as a newborn grub, he finally emerged, blinking, from their coiled catacombs.
He wove his way now through giant wombs, chamber after chamber, each trying to mutate him. They used their umbilical cords like nooses around his throat to strangle him, or like shackles to bind him hand and foot like a dominatrix's lover, then held him captive in their wombs and tried to manipulate his genetics and evolution with psychedelic amniotic fluid and hypnotic suggestions. The Oneirophage feared he would exit the wombs with some chaotic mixture of new attributes like horns, wings, fur, gills, flagellae, teats, a vagina, a second head, an exoskeleton, and worse. The Dreaming Predator was relieved to make his departure from the domineering wombs without any evolutionary enhancements to his body.
The cloacas that would shoot him into outer space opened at random on the walls and floor, and the Oneirophage had to avoid them like land mines. Finally, he came to a concentric circle of rivers, a downward spiral of blood within the bottommost realms of the spaceship, beneath which he could see the glimmering spires and parapets of his beloved Phantasmagorika. As the blood began to bubble and boil and toss like flames around him, scalding his flesh and raising red blisters on his skin, the Oneirophage used the Umbilicus to blow a hole in the wall of the Omnibeast's underbelly. Phantasmagorika lay directly beneath, still interlocked with the Omnibeast.
The Oneirophage dropped lightly down upon the glittering rooftops of his prism palace, the black mass of the Omnibeast pulsating overhead. The underbelly of the bestial spaceship was dripping incandescent blood, blood as hot as a burning star. The Oneirophage couldn't return to the circulatory labyrinth because of the boiling blood, which would soon be as hot as the flames of Hell and rip the flesh from his bones before incinerating his skeleton and immolating his soul. The Oneirophage watched as the scrotal sacs and wombs dangling from the Omnibeast's belly began to bulge, steam, and hiss as they filled with boiling blood, the ropes of black intestine lurching and sometimes bursting open like hoses to spray igneous blood like lava across the palace roof. The eight legs of the Arachniotics, folded together against the Omnibeast's underside, seemed impervious to the heat and magma, but they were also solid and impenetrable. There was no escape in any direction, no ascending back into the Omnibeast. He would have to return to his prism palace and hope that his larval spaceship had incubated long enough to fly free of its host and progenitor.
The Oneirophage returned to Phantasmagorika by spiral stairway and evaluated its growth. Its diaphanous walls breathed and pulsated, and there were sufficient amounts of eyeballs, mouths, phalluses, vaginas, and butterfly wings throughout the castle to assure the Oneirophage that it was gestating as planned. Serpentikal had been surgically grafted on as a figurehead and revived as a zombie. The Oneirophage observed that the serpent lord breathed and was coherent. Outside, the palac
e's four giant diaphanous pinions, two on the west wall and two on the east, had grown considerably and had begun to pulsate and beat with the rhythm of flight.
The Oneirophage explored his fortress until he was assured that Phantasmagorika was strong enough to soar through the cosmos on its own, with the undead corpse of Serpentikal to drag it through the interstellar voids and four pinions to control its speed and direction. He regretted his defeat at the hands of the Necrodelic, but knew that it was best to continue the vendetta at some point in the future, with more dreams and memories accrued within his brain, more black karma dripping like leprosy from his soul, and even greater levels of oneiromancy and bellipotence attained. For now, he needed to heal and complete the transformation of Phantasmagorika, to oversee its metamorphosis and raise it like brood. He could not risk another battle with the powerful Necrodelic at present. It lacerated his pride to flee, to wait, but the stakes were too high in this eschatological war for salvation.
23
Chariah felt his wounds cauterize with the indrawn heat of the bong, felt his wounds heal as he smoked the Oneirophage's hand. The severed appendage floated at the top of the bong's heart chamber, ripping apart finger by finger with each breath of the Necrodelic, long painted nails transforming into wet ash. Within the smoke from that hand, Chariah could taste the Oneirophage, taste the Dreaming Predator's very soul, taste that he still lived, taste that he soared away even now in his embryonic spaceship.
With psychic vision, the Necrodelic watched him depart, then smoked the rest of the hand he'd left behind, burning the lines of divination in his palm down to ashen nothings like the wicks of lit candles, then swallowing them like thin serpents, inhaling tattoos and fingerprints, and then the flesh, blood, and bones beneath them. Slowly, ever so peacefully, Chariah's awareness flowed in rivulets to the astral plane. Mother Chaos gathered the threads of those rivulets, wove them into an altered state of consciousness, and welcomed him into her womb and mouth.
"My Mother, I have failed."
Myriad tongues slithered their way into Chariah's mouth, born forth from Mother Chaos, then detached and swam down his throat, through his guts, and into his sinuses. They cleared the way for words, astral words, the dream-language of Mother Chaos which could be sensed with all five senses.
"...no, you have only begun...there will be other wars between you and your dream-devouring soulmate...this mission is not yet complete, my messiahling...but now, a new mission awaits...peer with me through the veils of time...gaze into this purple oracle...and observe the akashic records chronicled therein...look upon the origin of the Tantradox...the revolutions of the garden planet of Elasvai...and lo, even now your ship approaches the Dzandra system... where another piece of your destiny will be revealed..."
After observing the perverted rituals of the Tantradox for several hours within the oracle of Mother Chaos' purple eyes, Chariah blinked and found himself enfolded within the purple wings of his soulmate, riding beneath Mother Chaos like a possum child who had already learned to play dead. Together, Mother Chaos and Chariah traveled through the astral plane. Undead souls drifted by. Elementals played. Stars twinkled. Chariah's long black hair floated behind him, entangling with Mother Chaos' even longer purple hair, catching stardust to shimmer amid their silken strands.
Chariah could see all the chaos in the universe from his perch, the chaos of the physical plane, which was born here, in the astral plane, the very chaos which Mother Chaos adulated forth, in part to aid him, in part because it was her essence, and in part to defy the order of Satan, the laws of nature, science, ethics, and reality which Satan had created to govern the universe. Mother Chaos was every motion of the universe, but Satan was its every creator. Mother Chaos, omnisentient, was the apotheosis of all pleasure and pain, and a slave to their domineering continuum.
Chariah gathered a shred of that omnisentience through her spine, up through his penis which grazed her back as he embraced her from behind. A taste of reincarnation, a tingle of immortality, and then all the suffering of decillions of souls, each of which incarnated billion of times for billions of lives filled with suffering, then died billions of deaths and returned to Hell for billions of damnations. Chariah shuddered, knowing he must break this cycle to know peace, and take Mother Chaos with him, to the waiting beyond, to shatter her omnisentience.
Mother Chaos then turned around to face Chariah, drew his black phallus into her vagina, and loved him with an iron maiden womb, which punctured his astral sex and caused his physical penis to bleed on the plane above. The spikes were sharp and vibratory, and the pain stimulated the Dark Orgasm, stretching Chariah at once to Hell and the physical plane, from genesis to nirvana, before depositing him in the dripping meditation chamber of his spaceship.
Chariah left the smoky room and followed the maze to his cockpit. Once inside, he seated himself in the black lotus position. As he crossed his legs, his punctured penis touched his thigh with blood and Satan smiled. Chariah attached himself to the chamber's umbilical cords and psychically steered the Omnibeast through the Dzandra system. As the bestial spaceship drifted unto the garden planet Elasvai and the demonic Tantradox, the Necrodelic meditated in the zero-gravity cockpit, floating in mid-air in the black lotus position for several hours, readying himself for the battle to come.
24
Deep within the gardens of the planet Elasvai, in the sanctuary of the shadows of their nearby citadel, the white marble and heavily vined Fiendfarms, amid sprawling amaranthine fields of medicinal and psychedelic flora, beneath the seclusion of giant belladonna leaves, hidden behind the privacies of poisonous forests and mandalic topiaries, on a bed of diverse flowers, and wreathed in the smoke of lotus and opium, the tantric demons began their ritual. Two soulmates seeking the salvation of the Jh'a'vyraa, the crimson-fleshed, black-horned incubus and succubus arranged their surgical instruments on the flowerbeds and lush grasses like their very destinies. Cloven, six-fingered hands aligned rows of gleaming weapons, sharp surgical tools, and exsiccitae ranging from the pungent to the fragrant. Gently, the two lovers smoked opium from a conjugal pipe, whose bowl was a vagina ringed in blossoming labia and whose twin mouthpieces were the tapering thighs of a spread-eagled sex slave, an incarnadine marble statuette which was a sinister transposition of the busts often found amongst the sculptures of Elasvai, with hips and thighs instead of shoulders and arms, cut off at the knee rather than the elbow, female genitalia chiseled betwixt and atop them, in place of a cold staring head. Inhaling opium from the pornographic pipe, the incubus and succubus began numbing their bodies from the pain to come and imbuing their minds with the higher states of consciousness required for such tantric sorceries and surgeries that were to follow.
When the meadows, flowerbeds, plants, and trees surrounding them had taken on their true mystical properties, when their rose-colored bodies had grown paler and their dark green eyes had shrunken into their skulls, the incubus Drelrei began the ritual, the sacrifice which was rebirth. Humongous scissors gleamed in his hand as he positioned them, one blade over his succubus lover Junisia's right shoulder, one blade grazing her armpit. Slowly, he brought the scissors together. Wetly, flesh tore, muscles recoiled and sprang back, and bones popped. The severed arm fell to the grasses and blossoms beneath, pouring blood throughout the gardens. Paradise had been stained.
Junisia continued the ritual, as Drelrei placed the scissors in the six fingers of her remaining hand. She opened them around Drelrei's left shoulder, the opposite of her own, and yet also the mate of her bleeding socket. Junisia squeezed with her remaining appendage, and Drelrei's arm dropped to land beside that of his lover's, the two severed extremities sharing fluids like copulating worms.
Drelrei continued the ritual with a scalpel, slicing downward from the gaping wound of Junisia's armpit, opening up the entire right side of her body, all the way to the delicate, cloven hoof on the stained grass below. His erect, opium-engorged penis knew no difference between the long wound and a gian
t virgin's vagina whose hymen had just been burst and was leaking crimson nepenthe. The engorged phallus began to instinctively drip semen from the large crimson caldera in its tip. Junisia then applied the same dripping scalpel to her incubus soulmate, opening a mirror-image of her own elongated laceration upon Drelrei's left side, her lover's surgery revealing his blood, tissues, and inner organs as if they were private parts, genitalia awaiting her touch. She dropped the scalpel, caressed the length of the wound, and looked lovingly into her soulmate's eyes.
Drelrei was already preparing for the next stage of their surgery. He held two glistening black needles in his hand, one of which he gave to Junisia. They then began to sew their veins and arteries together, severing their blood vessels and then tying them in intricate knots or fusing them at their sundered, dripping tips. Arteries, veins, arterioles, venules, and capillaries were threaded through the eyes of the black needles and sutured to each other, then stitched into exposed muscle tissues in elaborate red tapestries. Arterioles were inserted into arteries and venules were inserted into veins, and sometimes capillaries were inserted into those same arterioles and venules, and then all was hermetically sealed. Interweaving their circulatory systems into one continuous network of conjugal blood vessels, Drelrei and Junisia now shared each other's blood and could feel one another's heartbeat. The bleeding of one was the bleeding of both, their bodies bonded and bound by a lover's symbiosis.