by Brant Danay
As the trees grew more aggressive, Chariah threw fireballs and breathed flame with equal force, and setting parts of the Forest of Flesh were ablaze. Some of the trees began quivering in fear, their skinlike bark growing sweaty and runneling with perspiration, their branches submissively pulling away from the Necrodelic as he trod in their direction. Some of the trees remained aggressive, while others seemingly ignored him, neither attacking or withdrawing, neither enraged or frightened. It was as though every tree had its own personality. The Necrodelic slashed his way through an army of striking, coiling, and constricting visceral roots to the base of one of the massive tree trunks. Examining it more closely, he could see the veins and arteries pumping beneath the soft skin that took the place of bark. Chariah hissed. Looking around, he noticed that the trees had faces as well, sunken into the trunks at varying heights, dispersed seemingly at random throughout the forest, murmuring to themselves or conversing amongst each other in alien languages. The undersides of living branches often bore breasts and testicles like fruit, and vaginas which served as lairs for two-headed arboreal creatures.
Chariah touched the skin of the peach-colored tree he had been examining. It was as soft as flesh. Other trees varied in color and feel. Some were albino, some dark brown, while others bore the scales and snakeskins of reptiles or the red and black flesh of various demons. Chariah ran a single claw along the trunk of the tree, opening a small surgical incision in its skin. The cut welled up with blood, dripped for a while, slowed, and then coagulated, leaving behind a dark scab. The Necrodelic struck a sudden blow to the tree with the back of his hand. The skin purpled and bruised with the force of his blow. The sentient tree whimpered.
The Necrodelic had abandoned his captured spaceship with only two items on his person. One of them was the pentagram-shaped grappling hook which he had used in his descent from the Omnibeast. He utilized this device now, turning his right hand upward and sliding the pentagram-shaped grappling hook out from its five tiny sheaths of skin in his palm. He tugged on the black cord coiled beneath the flesh of his hand, wrist, and forearm, then swung the five-pointed grapnel over his head and lodged it in one of the branches miles above. Droplets of blood flowed down the taut black wire as Chariah ascended into the air.
The adamantium coil bore him swiftly upwards, his long black hair streaming behind him. As the cord used itself up, it recoiled itself beneath the Necrodelic's skin, sheathing itself in its scabbard of flesh until needed again. Alighting silently upon the large branch, Chariah slid the grappling hook back into the open sections of skin on his palm. He then brought forth the second item with a half-swallowing, half-fire breathing motion. A compact, obsidian pipe unfolded from beneath his tongue, growing and expanding until it emerged from his mouth. The pipe clicked and turned and rearranged itself with tiny gears, transforming into a miniature sculpture of a winged dragon, whose mouth opened on hinges so that it could be filled with drugs. Far less effective than the Bloodbong, it would nonetheless provide the Necrodelic with the sustenance he needed while forced into exile from his intergalactic lair.
Chariah filled the sable dragon pipe with the skin, flesh, and blood of the sentient trees, ripping chunks of flesh right out of the trunks and branches around him, and opening gaping wounds overhead so that he could catch the dripping blood with the pipe. He caught and crushed a two-headed hawk in his fist as it flew by. Chariah squeezed and pulped the blood, organs, and entrails of the conjoined bird over the dragon's mouth bowl of the pipe, then stuffed the limp corpse inside after them. The Necrodelic then seated himself in the black lotus position upon the base of the branch, his spine against its trunk. He placed the mouthpiece of the pipe, the tip of the spiked tail of the dragon, between his charred lips. Using his pyromantic powers, he breathed forth the fires of Hell, to light the flesh and blood within the pipe. For a moment, an interplanal portal opened in his lungs, through which he could feel the heat of Hell and catch a brief glimpse of damned souls being tortured in the underworld, as well as the voyeuristic red eyes of Satan. The flesh in the dragon pipe's fanged mouth ignited, and as Chariah inhaled, its mechanical wings began to flutter. When he exhaled, the dragon's mouth spat fire, and its wings beat as though it were soaring the skies. Chariah drifted into a deeper state of consciousness, a higher state of awareness, a darker version of evil. He observed the Forest of Flesh with bloodshot eyes. All the trees were connected like Siamese twins, joined at the arm, the hip, the head, or the groin, in every conceivable variation. Some bore the stitchlike scars of surgery, others looked as though they had been fused or grafted together. There were faces everywhere, on every type of body part. Sometimes the fingers, arms, and phalluses grew their own fingers, arms and phalluses, which then repeated this process themselves, sometimes to infinity. The Forest of Flesh was one continuous conjoined entity, a million souls sharing one piece of flesh, the apotheosis of the Tantradox's sorcery.
His astral body began to tremble, then wriggled free into the air, and Chariah projected through the Forest of Flesh. Everywhere there were two-headed animals, Siamese twins, from spiders and nightworms and mosquitoes to doves and hawks and owls, from sloths and fauns and wolves to lions, manticores, and centaurs, surgically and genetically welded together at hundreds of different points by various body parts. The Tantradox was more than a tantric demon, more than a conjoined incubus and succubus with the powers of a high-ranking occult sex-wizard. The Tantradox was also a practitioner of sorcerous breeding programs and selective mutation, a genetimancer, creating and altering life in its own twisted image. It was an ancient order of tantra they practiced, one which encompassed not only orgies and sexual ceremonies and sacrifices, but the births and offspring which those rituals begat, as well.
Flying high above Elasvai in his astral body, Chariah observed as much as possible about the garden planet during his drug trip, etching maps of blood in his brain with psychic blades for his memory to absorb, noting various features of the landscape, climate, foliage, and indigenous life forms. The planet had an extremely high population, and was home to thousands of wild animals.
Throughout his astral projection, the Necrodelic hunted the Tantradox with his sorcerous powers of demonsight and echolocation. The Siamese twin demons had highly developed powers of camouflage, both physical and spiritual, an aspect inherent to and derived from their garden planet and its flora and fauna, which hunted and were hunted amongst the foliage-laden paradise in an eternal predator/prey continuum. This camouflage forced Chariah to employ a third method, a spell of temporary prescience, which finally enabled him to locate the whereabouts of the Tantradox.
Gazing through time, the clairvoyant vision of the Necrodelic revealed the form of his Siamese twin adversaries approaching the Forest of Flesh from the northeast in the near future. Observing this, it became clear to Chariah that their first encounter would be in the very Forest of Flesh which had imprisoned his spaceship.
Returning to his corporeal form, Chariah found that midnight had descended upon Elasvai. Midnight was one of the Necrodelic's natural habitats, and, when planet-bound, it was to his advantage to battle at night, when his nocturnal powers and sorceries were at their peak. The nights on Elasvai were brief, though, because of the demand for sunlight by the gardens that ruled it and the extremely eccentric and frequent tiltings of the planet. With this in mind, Chariah touched the phallus of the dragon pipe with the tip of his tongue, triggering the mechanism that made the pipe refold itself and retreat to its lair inside his mouth. He slid the pentagrammed grapnel from beneath the skin of his palm and measured a small length of coil in his hand, and then, with burned flesh on his breath, murder on his mind, and Hell in his eyes, took to the trees in search of the coming Tantradox.
26
As the towering citadel of the Fiendfarms shrank beneath the verdant horizons, dwindling from sight in the distance behind them upon the veranda where they had left it, the Tantradox rode a pair of Siamese twin chimeras to an ancient temple. The chimeras
were bound in a spiked leather harness, and shared a single bridle and saddle as well as flesh, blood, and organs, a bestial bondage signifying its submission to the Tantradox. Its saddle was ten feet tall and Drelrei and Junisia sat atop it like monarchs, the conjoined king and queen of Elasvai. Drelrei held the chimeras' reins and Junisia held a long whip, like a dominatrix. Together, as one, they steered and directed their congenitally joined chimera steed, rearing it in and lashing it as necessary, until they arrived at the stairway to the temple.
The paws of the six-legged mutation padded softly upon the stone steps as it bore its master to the entrance of the stone edifice. The temple had no roof, and thus permitted the yellow sun Dzandra to shine its light down upon its chambers. The Tantradox rode the conjoined chimeras to the center of the temple. They stepped from the saddle to a high altar that had been engraved with the sexual sigil of yin and yang.
Their cloven hooves clattered upon the stone altar and echoed throughout the empty temple. Drelrei continued to hold the chimeras in check while Junisia lowered a gallows that was hanging overhead. Together, they tied the reins of the chimera and the straps of its spiked leather harness through several of the small holes in the gallows, knotting them tightly into a series of body nooses. After removing the saddle and casting it to the floor ten feet below, the gallows was raised back up so that the Siamese twin chimeras dangled helplessly over their heads, its six legs clawing at the air, its weight causing the gallows pole to creak and make sharp cracking noises.
The Tantradox spent the next few hours smoking opium and psilocybin from pornographic pipes, their mouths within mouths within mouths chanting spells and mantras in ancient Elasvaian languages. They made love upon the bloodstained altar, imitating the sounds of various beasts as they fornicated. When midnight came like a saviour, the Tantradox was deep in a psychic and tantric trance. Together, with their hands mirroring one another, Drelrei and Junisia drew a ceremonial dagger from a built-in sheath on the gallows pole. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, the Siamese twin lovers raised the blade over their skulls and inserted the knife just below the hanging chimeras' ribcage, in a hollow between its middle foreleg and a conjoined bone socket.
The Tantradox began to surgically drag the dagger along the creature's abdomen with one long motion. The chimeras roared and thrashed, but still the Tantradox maintained the same slow cutting motion, oblivious to the temple-rattling screams of agony and the slashing claws of the beast as it swayed in mid-air on its leather body-nooses, fighting desperately to free itself from its harnessed bondage to the gallows. Deliberately, in dream-motion, the Tantradox sliced the Siamese twin chimera open from breast to genitals. Fur and flesh parted, and blood began to drip upon the altar, collecting and runneling along the carven circle and wavy meridian etched into the stone. The Tantradox spent nearly an hour cutting the beast open with one continuous meditative motion, their hands moving the ceremonial dagger so smoothly and slowly that its movement was barely perceptible, like when watching stars moving through the skies, blood coagulating into a scab, or a corpse decaying over a period of days. Once the incision was complete, the Tantradox leaned back against the gallows pole, still gripping the ceremonial dagger between its hands, and waited with tantric patience for their handiwork to take effect. The long gash upon the conjoined chimeras' underbelly had been performed as cleanly and as straightly as if by surgery, as if done with a thin scalpel on a bloodless cadaver. Its rims were crimson and smooth, its opening but a slit, like a pursed vagina. The wound barely bled at first, but this was not to last. After a few minutes, the belly of the Siamese twin chimeras began to bulge and swell, as though it were about to give birth. Then blood began to rain. The slit became a laceration and then a gaping deathblow, dilating like a vagina and then opening wide like the jaws of an Acheronic shark. Loops and coils of entrails suddenly began to emerge, dangle, and drop, and then two entire sets of intestines burst from the vivisected beast and fell in a hot pile across the altar of sacrifice, labyrinthine mounds of gore landing with wet slapping noises and splattering sounds, obscuring the engraved yin-yang symbol beneath.
Overhead, the death throes of the Siamese twin chimeras rocked the entire gallows. Its tormented roars shook the walls of the temple. The Tantradox paid the dying beast no heed, however, chanting tantric spells and drawing runes of blood in the thin tissues of the excavated innards with sharp black claws and curling fingernails. As the conjoined chimeras slowly perished above, the Tantradox began to copulate amongst their eviscerated intestines, laying down atop the altar of sacrifice and folding themselves together to fornicate in the gore, making love upon a bed of entrails. Drelrei and Junisia rolled and writhed amongst the warm intestines, its lengths twining around their arms and legs and encircling their bodies as they did so. Junisia's scalplock dipped repeatedly into the blood, until it was sopping wet, and her jet hair seemed more crimson than black. Drelrei's ten testicles resonated harmoniously with Junisia's ten clitorises. Their bodies drenched in blood and wrapped in intestines, their souls alight with tantric sex, Drelrei and Junisia came to simultaneous orgasm amongst the offal at the exact moment the Siamese twin chimeras shuddered and died on the gallows above.
The ritual was half complete. The Tantradox carefully stood up amongst the loops of intestines. Junisia pulled a pipe from her dripping scalplock and they smoked more opium and psilocybin. Once the proper state of consciousness had been achieved, the Tantradox began to study the patterns of the entrails they had made love in. They observed the way the entrails had fallen, the distances, the shapes, the labyrinths, and the impressions of their own bodies upon them. They noted the way the blood had flowed, the hieroglyphics it had written. They could read the future in the spilled intestines of the conjoined chimeras, their demonic skills of tantric haruspication feeding their eyes with revelation after revelation until their brains felt as though they would burst.
One thing, more important than all else, was foretold not only in the patterns of intestines and blood, but in the signs left by the Siamese twins' tantric sex. Where Drelrei and Junisia had made love upon the altar of sacrifice, they had unwittingly created a bloody chiaroscuro of the Necrodelic, and their indentations and sexual sculptings of the intestines had raised an abstract relief of the flesh-smoking demon within his own crimson outline. The future was clearly etched before them in a work of sacrificial art. Similar rituals, which were performed routinely by the Tantradox, had hinted at this potential future in the past, and would continue to confirm these divinations over the next several weeks. The higher levels of evil now possessed by Drelrei and Junisia, having been unleashed when incubus and succubus had been reborn into the archetypal form of the Tantradox, had strengthened and darkened the gravity of their shared soul, thus pulling adversaries and soulmates into their orbit like planets and stars. Their newfound powers had not gone unnoticed amongst demonkind, and the Tantradox was beginning to attract vendettas like erotomaniac and nymphomaniac necrophiliacs to mass graves of fresh bleeding corpses.
27
Drelrei and Junisia were, and had always been, nomads, continually wandering the gardens of Elasvai together. Whether in the enormous wheeled citadel of the Fiendfarms, on the backs of beasts of burden, or by their own hooved and cloven foot, Drelrei and Junisia maintained a perpetual state of peregrination. The very planet itself was their lair, their sanctuary, and their palace, and Drelrei and Junisia perpetually explored and circumnavigated their paradise, experimenting with its ambrosias, discovering its strange secrets, and communicating or battling with its plants and wildlife. The lovers never remained in any one territory for long, rarely making love, partaking of food and drugs, or performing their tantric ceremonies in the same place for more than a day. Drelrei and Junisia were simultaneously feral and enlightened, their wanderings equal parts hunting and gathering, musk and bloodlust, warmongering and spirit quest. The Tantradox was an eternal gypsy, a beast migrating to the end of time, a demon on a pilgrimage to the edge of the universe
.
This day, however, was different, a day foretold by haruspicy and predestined in Hell. The Tantradox spent this day observing the heavens from a hillside precipice several miles high, where coca plants grew one hundred feet tall, awaiting the shooting star that had been augured in the designs of the eviscerated Siamese twin chimeras' entrails several nights ago. The tallest amongst the Cliffs of Caine, the precipice was the highest point on all of Elasvai, the zenith of the garden planet. It served as the Tantradox's observatory, for it was the best location for stargazing and astrological divination on the entire paradise planet.
Chewing on coca leaves, Drelrei and Junisia studied the sapphire skies. With their senses heightened and their consciousness quickened, not a detail of the landscape nor the heavens escaped their dilated eyes. Herds of animals roaming the plains below could be seen individually, their features clear enough to study, and their vast numbers of several thousand exactly counted within a nanosecond. Clouds grew like tumors in the endless firmament, and the Tantradox knew the various forms they would sculpt themselves into hours before they even began to do so. The sun Dzandra shone luminously, its copious rays of topaz light feeding the garden planet and everything in it.
The Tantradox watched carefully throughout the day as Dzandra rose to its peak, plateaued, and then began to sink. They watched as the herds of animals grazed, played, settled, and then rested; watched as the clouds rearranged themselves, drifted past, and then dissipated. For hours, the Tantradox waited, eating the leaves of the giant coca plants to improve its vision and its powers of discernment and observation, listening to the rustlings of the albino cocaine demons throughout the cliffs around them, foraging, fornicating, and satiating their addictions. The coca leaves also served as an aphrodisiac, and the Tantradox made love several times as they spent the day in the Cliffs of Caine, kissing with benumbed lips and tongues, their hearts beating pulpishly, adrenaline rushing like whitewater rapids in their veins, their orgasms like seizures accompanied by booming thunderclaps.