by Brant Danay
The evening began with a trip to the belladonna gardens. After being submerged in nightshade, the demons were dragged through patches of psilocybic mushrooms, ergot, jimson weed, and morning glory. They continued with a journey through an ancient, tick-infested forest, which consisted of bouncing off trees, being lacerated on jagged tree stumps, and being infested and masticated by thousands of ticks and termites. A gauntlet of termite mounds was next, the large insect edifices exploding as Chariah and the Oneirophage rolled into them while the chariot careened around them in the distance, navigating the teeming hills like a minefield while making sure their victims crashed into them whenever possible.
The ancient hunting grounds had been abolished by the Tantradox long ago, but had been left intact through the centuries and preserved as a piece of history. The sphinxes broke through its gates and stampeded through the anachronistic forest. All the old animal snares and traps were still in place, and were now triggered by passing forms of the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage. Steel teeth closed around their ankles, their genitals, their arms, their hair and their faces. Old leaf covered pits were disturbed, the Necrodelic and Oneirophage impaled briefly on the wooden stakes below, then ricocheting from the walls of the pit and being dragged into further torment. Nooses closed around any part of their bodies, leaving them suspended in mid-air between trees and chariot, stretching them like torture racks before the branches broke, releasing them to tumble awkwardly to the ground.
The Oneirophage was ejaculating again. Golgothas pummeled them with the skeletons of extinct animals, breaking their bones with the bones of others. The short night came to an end. Dzandra arose in the sky. The Tantradox celebrated the dawn by beating the Necrodelic and the freshly transformed Morpheus Rex with fifty-foot quarterstaffs.
The only time the sphinxes ceased their incessant running was at the behest of the Tantradox, which called out a commandment and begun to rein them in as they came upon a flowerbed of hyacinth. A slow rumble was building along the horizon, as a herd of Siamese twin triceratops were thundering closer and closer. Minutes later, the stampeding dinosaurs trampled the Necrodelic and Morpheus Rex to a bloody pulp beneath their thousand hooves. Once the herd of triceratops had passed, leaving the Necrodelic and Morpheus Rex broken and moaning in their wake, the sphinxes were spurred once more into action.
The morning hours were passed with a trip down a piranha-infested river. The sphinxes and their chariot ran alongside the shore, while the Necrodelic and Morpheus Rex were dragged through the waters, where the frenzied piranhas attempted to devour them. The demons were then dragged through whitewater rapids filled with jagged rocks, in which they were often turned completely around and knocked into strange positions, spinning and twisting in mid-air and underwater.
The sphinxes ran down a hill which corresponded with the river and its eventual waterfall. The Necrodelic and Morpheus Rex descended via the raging and towering cataract, landing in broken, bleeding masses on the rocks below and resurfacing in the catfish-infested pools of Candiru Falls. The thin catfish embedded themselves immediately in the Necrodelic's black phallus, as well as both of Morpheus Rex's penises. They swam like needles straight into their urethras, and there they stayed, entrenched in the interior of their members. Morpheus Rex was again stimulated, and found himself with twin erections and multiple orgasms. The masochistic dream-eater had begun to enjoy the prolonged torture, and as they were dragged through various fields and gardens until the afternoon, often masturbated by turning over on his stomach and rubbing his phalluses on plants, flowers, grasses, and the abrasive, decorticating ground.
Finally the chariot came to the Temples of Tantra. The Necrodelic and Morpheus Rex were dragged over ancient paved pathways and bridges and through stone pagodas, leaving long smears of blood in their wake. Entire temples were razed by the force of their bouncing bodies as the Tantradox deliberately steered them into the stone edifices, dragging them through the walls with explosions of dust and bringing the ceilings and rooftops down around them like a rainfall of monoliths and obelisks. The sphinxes dragged them to the largest temple, up its steps, through its gothically arched entrance, and down a pathway between several rows of ornately carven wooden pews, all the way to the altar of sacrifice at its end, where the Tantradox dismounted. At long last, the forced tour of the garden planet had ended.
The Tantradox began sharpening a ceremonial dagger on its horns. Chariah looked into the eyes of the Siamese twins with his burning crimson gaze. The Tantradox thought he and Morpheus Rex would be weak sacrificial victims after the long hours of torment. It was a severe miscalculation. Chariah was so enraged he that he no longer felt the alarums of pain shooting through his nervous system. The only thing the Tantradox had done was arouse his Hellish wrath.
He glanced at Morpheus Rex beside him. The Dreaming Predator seemed to have enjoyed the ordeal. Pain and pleasure were often the same to the masochistic dream-eater, and the Tantradox's torture had heightened his oneiromantic powers in much the same way it had raised Chariah's fury. The Tantradox would have been better served to let them finish their duel, in which one or both of them could well have met their demise.
The Necrodelic snarled and growled beneath his spiked ball gag. The Siamese twins were as foolish as they were perverted. When they released him from his bonds, he was going to fuck them up worse than Satan himself could possibly imagine. Fuck them up all the way to Hell.
34
The Tantradox had summoned all of its pets, every creature on Elasvai, to witness the sacrifice of the Oneirophage and the Necrodelic. As the topaz sun Dzandra set behind the Temples of Tantra they came, a cortege of the wicked and the damned. Hydraman entered the temple and sat in one of the stone pews. A towering, green-scaled, hominid reptile with two legs and nine heads, Hydraman stood over fifteen feet tall, each one of his necks longer than his entire lower body. His necks were arrayed on a candelabra-like arch of flesh that curved upwards to both right and left on a single, base neck which was shorter, thicker, and stouter than its brethren above. Hydraman's nine necks were perfectly symmetrical, and each bore an identical dragon head atop it.
Hydraman was followed into the temple by the Triskadekaminotaur, a thirteen-headed minotaur from the Tantradox's genetic farms. Behind him came the Multiworm, another of the Tantradox's mutations, a wriggling mass of worms joined by heads, tails, segments, and spiny hairs, shaped like a giant homunculus and walking upright with a hideous gait, stepping, wriggling, and shuffling all at once, its extremities waving in the air. Cerberus, the black, blood-slavering, five-headed hellhound, was chained to the vermian abomination, and walked beside it like a pet and a familiar both. They were followed by all manner of centaurs, satyrs, cocaine demons, birdmen, and beastmen.
All around the temple, the Siamese twin creatures of Elasvai gathered to watch the sacrifice through the open, diamond-shaped windows of the stone temple. Manticores, basilisks, griffins, hippogriffs, leucrotas, cockatrices, and sphinxes all made their way to the plains, followed by herds of conjoined dinosaurs and packs of conjoined beasts, and all manner of hybrids, cross-breeds, mutations, and geryons from the Tantradox' genetic farms, including demons with animal heads, animals with demon heads, and every species of fauna indigenous to Elasvai sewn, grafted, and welded to members of different species in infinite combinations, as well as an entire pack of wolves which had been surgically combined into one massive, multiple lupine entity, and a pride of lions to which had been done the same.
From the griffin, harpy, bat, and raptor clouded skies Pestilentia descended, to observe the ceremony through the large cleft in the temple roof. She brought along with her a retinue of insectoid royalty, including one of the ten leaders of her army, the gigantic Warlord Centipedicus IV, who carried a different weapon in each of his hundred hands and was a master of them all. Also joining Pestilentia were Madam Mantis, Mistress Mantis, and Mater Mantis, the three matriarchs of her drones, her slaves, and her young; the wasp demon Stingmeister, slave
driver of her worker hordes; and her young nephew, Prince Scorpio. As usual, her reclusive mate Panzebub had chosen not to join her.
As the moons rose and starlight fell over the Temples of Tantra and the surrounding fields, the face of Satan appeared in the skies like aurora borealis, his crimson head the size of a planet on a collision course with Elasvai, filling the stratosphere with his phallic horns, his smiling fangs, his smoking eyes, and his external veins and arteries. The sadistic creator of the universe had come to watch as well, the ultimate voyeur.
The temple had been filled. The throngs of animals were gathered around it in a circle stretching beyond every horizon. Pestilentia and her insects hovered and perched around the opening in the roof. The winged creatures fluttered in mid-air. The gargantuan death's head of Satan glowed in the night sky. The moment of sacrifice had arrived.
The Tantradox emerged from the temple's antechambers wearing a black, hooded robe of animal fur. The mark of the pentagram was still burned into its chest, and was visible between the open folds of the robe. The Siamese twin demons slowly walked to the altar of sacrifice with their peculiar, three-legged gait, a lit brazier in their hands releasing a psychotropic incense of opium, lotus, myrrh, and sandalwood. They used the brazier to light the candles in the sconces ringing the chamber and the altar. The flames illuminated the temple, flickering over the faces of the audience and illuminating the bloodstained altar, which had been draped in shadow. A large gallows loomed over the altar, and from it the bodies of the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage were suspended cruciform, side by side, on one continuous, complicated harness of inflexible hempen rope. Their necks were constricted in nooses, their arms outstretched and tethered by the wrists to the poles of the gallows on either side, and to the yoni rings in the gallows above. The spiked ball gags were still in their mouths, and their bodies were covered in scrapes, scratches, cuts, punctures, bruises, abrasions, and rashes from the tortuous dragging. Stretched tautly in mid-air on the binding mesh of the hempen harness, the legs, arms, and head of the Necrodelic formed the five points of a star, the ancient, sacrificial pentagram position.
The Tantradox laid its sacrificial tools upon the altar. Along with a double-bladed ceremonial dagger was a giant pair of scissors, a long saw, a scalpel, a lit torch, and a giant, threaded needle. Drelrei and Junisia removed their hood and climbed atop the altar. Each took one of the curved handles of the sword-sized scissors in each hand. They placed the blades over the Necrodelic's shoulder and attempted to sever his arm. The scissors bit into the Necrodelic's flesh. Blood spattered the altar. The Tantradox tried to close the blades, but could not slice through the Necrodelic's muscles. They tugged and pulled, shoved and yanked, cursed and chanted, all to no avail. His muscles had become like an adamantium fiber, impenetrable and resistant to steel.
The Tantradox turned their attention to the Oneirophage. Chariah began sifting through stratagems and battle-plans as he relaxed the muscles in his shoulder, letting the dark energy which he had concentrated into that area flow back to the rest of his body. He shuddered with wrath as he realized what the "sacrifice" planned by the Tantradox entailed: the joining of his flesh with the Oneirophage's as Siamese twins. Whether the Tantradox intended to murder, torture, enslave, breed, or rape them, or simply cast them back into the universe in this mutated and execrable form, was irrelevant to the Necrodelic, for he would never allow the gruesome and perverted ceremony to be completed.
Astral projection and possession of the Tantradox, as he had done in the Forest of Flesh, seemed his best option. He quickly discerned that the Siamese twins had cast a spell of warding to prevent that very thing, however, before the commencement of the ritual. He turned his crimson gaze to the audience. Perhaps he could possess one of them. He began to evaluate the creatures with black logic and dark psychic probings.
The Tantradox had positioned the scissors over the right shoulder of the Oneirophage. They closed the blades, and this time, unlike their attempts to amputate the Necrodelic's arm, the dream-eater's tattooed limb easily detached. The severed arm dangled from the hempen fetters until the Tantradox bisected it at the wrist, and it fell from its remaining bond to the altar below. The Tantradox turned, kneeled, and picked up the lit torch to cauterize the wound. When the Tantradox rose again, however, the Oneirophage's arm had regenerated itself.
With four wide eyes and two confused expressions, the Tantradox glanced back to the altar. The bloody limb still lay there twitching, but the Oneirophage had grown an exact replication in its place. The Tantradox bent down to retrieve the scissors and sever this new limb as well. They rose and clove the Oneirophage's arm from the shoulder once again. It fell beside the first in a joined pool of blood. The raw red wound in the Oneirophage's shoulder began to writhe like a nest of serpents, and then, like a lizard regenerating its tail, the Oneirophage grew another perfect version of the sundered arm, an exact replica all the way down to the tiniest details of the most inconspicuous tattoos. From the back of the temple could be heard the ninefold cacchinations of Hydraman. The Tantradox cut the Oneirophage's arm off a third time, a fourth, a fifth, then flung the scissors with a loud clatter to the ground and turned to grab their ceremonial dagger. If the sacrificial demons would not cooperate, they would be eviscerated.
The Tantradox, however, in its rage and its confusion, had failed to realize that none of the regenerated arms the Oneirophage sprouted were tethered to the harness. When the Siamese twins rose again, gripping their dagger, the Oneirophage's unfettered right hand shot out and grabbed Drelrei by the throat. His fist squeezed the incubus' larynx like a boa constrictor as Junisia wildly flailed at the dream-eater with the dagger. The Oneirophage released Drelrei's purpling throat and backfisted Junisia in the face, then grabbed the ceremonial dagger and cut himself free of his bonds.
The Oneirophage and the Tantradox wrestled upon the altar, bashing each other's heads into the stone, rolling back and forth and finally falling to the ground. Chariah strained his head to watch the combat between the Oneirophage and the Tantradox, hoping the dream-eater would extricate himself and cut him free. He had decided against possessing one of the creatures in the audience, not willing to leave his physical body vulnerable through astral projection in this environment and situation, even if only for a moment.
The Tantradox had gained the advantage. Drelrei had a handful of the Oneirophage's prism-plaited hair in his fist, and with a knee to the base of his spine forced him down into a kneeling position. Junisia raked at his throat and face with her black fingernails, then grabbed the torch from the altar and burned the side of his face and his chest, obscuring his tattoos with wet, black, bloody soot.
Drelrei called out to Pestilentia hovering above, then grabbed the Oneirophage beneath his shoulders and heaved him high into the air, throwing him through the opening in the temple roof. The Empress of Insects caught him in her viscous flesh, where he immediately stuck and struggled like a sea serpent in a tar pit, sinking into the thick brown semiliquidity of one of her lower legs, wherein he would be entombed if he could not free himself.
Chariah cursed the Oneirophage. The Tantradox recaptured the dagger and used it to eviscerate the Necrodelic, slashing quickly and deeply, no longer bearing any patience for ritual or ceremony. The Necrodelic's intestines burst out like a nest of black mambas. Chariah could control every single part of his body, however, including his internal organs, and, utilizing this power, wrapped his dark entrails around both of the Tantradox's necks, the coils of his intestines crushing their throats like pythons. The Siamese twins leaked blood from their mouths as they hacked at Chariah's exposed viscera. The Necrodelic recoiled his intestines and rearranged them, binding the Tantradox' arms behind its back and forcing the Siamese twin demons to their knees. He tightened the entrails around their throats still further, squeezing their windpipes as though with a garrote, choking them into semi-consciousness and thus incapacitating them while he tried to free himself.
He scanned the aud
ience again, once more considering a possession, but with his guts now dangling from his torso it was far too dangerous to abandon his body. He had no powers of hypnosis or mind control, and all his other sorceries were severely hindered by being bound in the pentagram position. Chariah dragged his crimson eye contact through the crowd, then found that he himself was the focus of someone's eye contact.
Tenfold eye contact.
The black eyes of Cerberus bore simultaneously into his own. Chariah returned the eye contact with the five-headed hellhound, and was suddenly overcome with a strong, vertiginous sense of deja vu. He had known the hellhound in previous lives. It was a soulmate.
Chariah called telepathically to Cerberus. The beast immediately responded to its ancient master, tearing free of the Multiworm, bursting forth and dragging an entire bloody section of the monstrosity with him. The five-headed mastiff leapt onto the sacrificial altar, maintaining psychic contact with the Necrodelic all the while. An instant later, it rose up on its muscular hindquarters and ripped the ball gag from Chariah's mouth, shattering the links of the chain which held it in place as it did so.
The growling beast began tearing at the masses of tethers, before suddenly being spitted upon the spear of a centaur. Cerberus whined and toppled from the altar, run through from flank to flank by the weapon. Chariah sucked a fireball up from Hell, through his lungs, and spat it at the centaur, setting it aflame. Chariah breathed in the psychedelic smoke of the centaur's charred flesh, healing himself, revitalizing his dark energies, and empowering himself with black enlightenment. The Necrodelic struggled, but still could not loose his bonds. The tethers had closed off too many of his energy points. He contemplated setting a fire that would destroy the whole temple, gallows, bonds, audience and all. It would have to be a disintegrating conflagration, else the pieces of the stone temple would crash down and cripple him.