by Brant Danay
Chariah sucked in his breath and prepared to unleash a powerful blast of flames from Hell that would instantaneously incinerate the Temples of Tantra and everything and everyone inside it except himself. His lungs glowed redly in his chest, visible beneath his black sculpted pectoral muscles as he inhaled and began drawing forth Hellfire from below. The Necrodelic began to exhale, then noticed from the corner of his crimson eyes the fallen form of Cerberus, the spear still sticking through his side. The five-headed dog lay wounded, but alive.
At the last minute Chariah tilted his head upwards and breathed the disintegrating fire through the hole in the temple ceiling. The flames rushed like screaming banshees into one of Pestilentia's upper legs and burned straight through the entire limb in less than a nanosecond. The lower part of the leg, with the wriggling Oneirophage still struggling in its ambrium, fell through the cleft in the roof to the temple floor, where it melted into a sticky golden-brown puddle, bearing thousands of preserved insect corpses in its viscid pools. The Oneirophage thrashed about in the scalding ambrium as it liquified, but was unable to free himself. He looked upwards and caught the Necrodelic with his kaleidoscopic eye contact.
"Set me free, death-smoker. I saved your life," the Oneirophage hissed.
"You're delusional, dream-eater. I'd have slain the Tantradox in time, bound or not. I'll not play your little game."
"Just set me free," the Oneirophage hissed, his eyes spinning in their sockets.
The Necrodelic was more susceptible to hypnosis in his bound and weakened state, and spat a long stream of Hellfire into the pool of ambrium. The sludgelike mass of honey, opium, amber, and ectoplasm melted, and the Oneirophage arose from its morass with steaming ambrium dripping down his body like hot candlewax.
"Return the karma," snarled the Necrodelic.
The Oneirophage grabbed the scalpel from the altar of sacrifice and sundered the Necrodelic's bonds. Chariah untangled his entrails from the Drelrei and Junisia's throats, then grabbed them by the necks and threw them violently against the rear wall of the chamber. The stone wall cracked as the Tantradox struck it. Drelrei and Junisia fell limply onto a stack of storage chests, which then toppled and spilled opium and incense all over the floor.
Chariah jumped from the altar and knelt at the side of Cerberus. He placed his hands on the panting dog, then withdrew the spear from its side. He whispered a word of healing, his palms glowing red for an instant, and then the five-headed hellhound growled and jumped back to its feet, barking and howling its canine battle-cries at the Tantradox.
"You should have killed me while I was bound," said the Necrodelic to the Oneirophage. "You'll never have another chance."
"And you should have slain me while I lay trapped in ambrium. You owe me your life, and twofold at that, Necrodelic."
"More games, Oneirophage. No lives have been saved or spared here, no blood-debts accrued. You'd have freed yourself in time, just as I would have. We are not symbiotic, you and I."
"That we are not," the Oneirophage agreed. "But we are soulmates, though dark soulmates we be."
"Then let us sacrifice those who would sacrifice us," spoke the Necrodelic in an ominous tone.
The Oneirophage smiled, his three forked tongues flickering from between his rainbow lips, and gathered up the giant scissors in his hands.
Chariah walked over to the altar and grabbed the long saw. Running his black fingertips along its razor-sharp teeth until they bled, he waited for the Oneirophage to drag the unconscious Tantradox from amongst the broken chests and piles of spilled incense and opium. The Necrodelic's crimson eyes blazed in the nocturnal shadows of the temple. The Oneirophage lifted the Tantradox over his shoulder and then dumped it heavily atop the altar. Chariah sprang onto the altar with a pantherish leap and a splash of blood and proceeded to tie two hangman's nooses in the sundered harness dangling from the gallows..
The Oneirophage, meanwhile, tore the black robe from around Drelrei and Junisia's shoulders and bound their hands behind their back, in a complex serpent's knot that, when completed, formed the shape of a coiled cobra. Together, the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage lifted the Tantradox into the air and maneuvered their heads into the nooses. Chariah walked over to the controls in the gallows pole to draw the rope tighter, then said to the Oneirophage, "Wake them up."
The Oneirophage twirled his long fingernailed right hand and produced the strawlike Umbilicus. He blew first into Drelrei's mouth, then into Junisia's, resuscitating the incubus and succubus instantly. The master of dreams was also a master of sleep, and could giveth or taketh either one at will.
The Tantradox awoke and immediately panicked, swinging and kicking in mid-air. The Necrodelic's crimson eye contact met the Oneirophage's kaleidoscopic eye contact. Chariah lifted the long saw with his right hand, and placed it between Drelrei and Junisia's head, settling it in the cleft between their shoulders where their flesh had been surgically joined. With a rhythmic dragging of the saw, Chariah began to undo what the Tantradox had done.
Drelrei and Junisia screamed, cried, and begged for mercy. Chariah paid them no heed, just continued to stoically saw their flesh asunder, separating their joined shoulders, opening a wide crimson valley in their mutual chest. The Necrodelic then stepped back and let the Oneirophage take his turn. The Oneirophage placed the scissors underneath their grotesquely misshapen middle leg, their shared leg, and began to cut. The blades of the scissors clashed loudly together as he drove them upwards, slicing through foot and heel, ankle and calf, knee and thigh, severing tendons, rending bone, and bloodying his arms to the elbows as he toiled. He stopped below their genitals, giving them, for the moment, a third crotch, a scarlet prosthetic groin.
The Oneirophage stepped back, and held the bloody scissors down at his side. The gashed Tantradox dangled like a piece of raw meat joined only by gristle and a few pieces of bone. Drelrei and Junisia wept. Inspired by their tears, Chariah placed a talon beneath Drelrei's right eye and another beneath Junisia's left eye, each catching in the soft skin at the corners of their eyelids. He slowly dragged the two claws down their faces, opening red furrows for their tears to course through. He moved the claws to the insides of their eye sockets, and sliced another crimson groove for the tears to runnel down. He drew his hands closer together, as if in prayer, then slit the other inside corners of their eyes all the way to their chins. His talons moved closer together again, as if magnetically drawn to one another, and scratched two final rivers for their tears to sail.
With eight crimson Phlegethons canalized and irrigated in the flesh of their faces by the dark claws of the Death Addict, the Tantradox whimpered and struggled, their crying eyes wincing in pain, terror, and despair. Finally, Chariah brought the talons of his two forefingers together, blade against blade, razor against razor. He flicked the rest of his claws into place beside them, letting his palms hover over the Tantradox like the shadow of death. Chariah breathed in and raised his hands over his head, his ten claws forming one mighty black guillotine, its edges gleaming, glistening with slick blood, and then, with all the fury of a lightning bolt, he brought the Hellsword down, severing the Siamese twin lovers from one another completely, sundering the Tantradox from itself.
The two halves twisted violently on their nooses, spinning and swinging like fresh slabs of raw flesh on meathooks during an earthquake, dangling in a cannibal's abbatoir on some seismically disturbed moon or planet. Chariah let Drelrei and Junisia hang for several minutes, their bodies trembling and seeming to spark to life when they briefly touched, only to drift away from each other's cloven halves once again. Finally, Chariah cut them down from the nooses with a flick of his claws. Drelrei and Junisia tumbled into each other's arms and collapsed into one another's gory embrace, their bleeding forms intertwining upon the altar of sacrifice. Chariah kicked their tangled bodies from the altar with one taloned foot. They landed in two quivering lumps on the floor.
"Begone with thee," the Necrodelic spoke. "Take thy humiliation and
thy dismemberment and flee into your gardens, to live your lives in torture and despair, and know that when you return, with your hearts full of vengeance and your eyes bright with scorn, I shall sunder thee again, and send thy souls separately to Hell, damning you to be eternally..."
The Necrodelic paused, looming over the fallen entity he had ripped in twain from atop the bloodstained altar, then breathed forth the fires of Hell over their bleeding bodies, to cauterize their wounds so that they might flee in each other's arms and be forced to live their lives as two, and in the streams of flame that burst from his blackened lips could be heard the final word of his curse, like thunder and gongs and poltergeists.
"Apart..."
35
The crippled Tantradox made its way from the temple, sometimes trying to walk with one another's support and falling in a bloody heap, at other times slithering, crawling, or rolling down the aisle of the basilica, then dragging each other down the stone steps and whistling for Siamese twin cockatrices to alight and bear them away. Back within the temple walls, the Oneirophage spoke to the Necrodelic in his hissing voice.
"We should have killed them."
Chariah watched with red-hot eyes as the bisected Siamese twin lovers soared off into the night on the back of their half-bird, half-serpent steed.
"I'm not through torturing them," he replied. "Vengeance is a drug. It's sexual, psychedelic. Its pure black hatred, and I'm drunk on it. I wish to partake of it a while longer."
The Oneirophage watched the departure of the disjoined Tantradox through the open temple doors as well, his kaleidoscopic eyes spinning in the darkness.
As the Tantradox disappeared over the horizon, Chariah refocused his gaze upon all the creatures gathered inside and around the temple.
"Genocide time," Chariah said, dropping with feline grace and evil purpose from the altar. He was immediately followed by the Oneirophage, who still wielded the enormous scissors. Cerberus, who had been waiting obediently at the side of the altar, sprang into battle at the cue from its master, tearing into the Multiworm with all five sets of jaws, shaking his heads rabidly back and forth, tearing the conjoined vermian monstrosity to shreds with his black fangs, avenging himself upon the monstrosity that had held his leash in bondage just an hour before.
Chariah lifted his clawed hands over his shoulders and then brought them down quickly at his sides. There was a loud thunderclap, and all of the centaurs, satyrs, cocaine demons, birdmen, and beastmen in the temple spontaneously combusted, leaving behind nought but an explosion of ashes, swirling around and around as if caught in the winds of a powerful storm.
Hydraman was exchanging headbutts with the Triskadekaminotaur in the aisle of a pew near the temple's entrance. Though outnumbered thirteen heads to nine, Hydraman had gained the advantage, raining skulls down upon the faces of the Triskadekaminotaur with a violent rhythm, a sickening drumbeat of bone striking bone that was sometimes accompanied by the shattering of a nose, the splintering of a jaw, or the sundering of a suture. Hydraman pounded the Triskadekaminotaur's heads like a musical instrument, sometimes dropping two or three headbutts simultaneously. The thirteen-headed abomination was stumbling backwards on an arching spine as Hydraman continued to rain blows, finally knocking the Triskadekaminotaur onto his back and then releasing a final barrage of head butts, these magnified exponentially by the stone ground at the back of his skulls. Thirteen explosions of red filled the air as thirteen skulls were encerebrated, thirteen faces melting into boneless pantomimes of themselves, thirteen brains flowing in pink puddles along the ground and spattering the walls of the temple with dripping carnelian.
Hydraman arose, his nine dragonheads bleeding, eyes and lips swollen, noses broken, foreheads split wide open, parts of his faces and body torn by the Triskadekaminotaur's horns, to stand triumphantly beside the Necrodelic, the Oneirophage, and Cerberus upon the battlefield.
Pestilentia and her insect hordes had followed the torn Tantradox, assisting Drelrei and Junisia with their escape and blessing them with offerings of opium before returning to the Temples of Tantra. She buzzed angrily over the aperture in the ceiling now as the battle within the temple came to an end.
"Necrodelic, in addition to betraying and slaying my sister Spidratha, you have mutilated my soulmates. Oneirophage, the vendetta between your races and ours is an ancient one, but you have fueled it this night with your mistreatment of my acolytes. Before the sun rises, the two of you will be ornaments in my flesh, just another pair of fossils in my menagerie of the dead."
At that moment, Prince Scorpio burst through the temple doors, his tail streaming with venom, and charged the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage. He somersaulted down the aisle and sprang onto his hands, his venomous stinger aimed at the face of the Necrodelic. Chariah casually raised his right hand and, using two of his long talons like a pair of scissors, snipped off the dripping tip of Prince Scorpio's tail. The young scorpion sprang back onto his own open wound, sprawling in his own slippery ichor between the pews while Chariah held his severed tail up like a trophy. The Necrodelic lunged forward, and when Prince Scorpio raised his pincers to defend himself, Chariah caught each of them between a pair of claws in either hand, and like scissors chopped them off as well. As Prince Scorpio's severed chelae thrashed and pinched the air reflexively in a puddle of blood on the floor, Chariah turned sideways and struck with the same two dripping claws of his right hand with which he had severed the scorpion demon's left pincer, bringing the long razor-sharp talons of his index and middle fingers together like a pair of shears around Prince Scorpio's throat and clipping off his head.
A moment later Pestilentia rammed the temple with her titanic body, razing the entire edifice to the ground in a shower of large stones and an explosion of dust with the force of her charging girth. The Necrodelic, the Oneirophage, Hydraman, and Cerberus raced through the crumbling doors at the last moment and down the temple steps, where Pestilentia's minions, Warlord Centipedicus IV, Mistress Mantis, Madam Mantis, Mater Mantis, and the Stingmeister awaited them.
The Necrodelic engaged the gargantuan Warlord Centipedicus IV, whose hundred arms brandished a hundred different weapons simultaneously. Chariah defended himself with a furious black frenzy of claws, blocking, deflecting, and knocking aside every attack with blinding speed, all the while ducking, leaping, spinning, and dodging whenever necessary, sometimes while levitating in mid-air up to two hundred feet off the ground to match the colossal insect demon's towering height.
Hydraman attacked the triumvirate of mantid matriarchs, knocking the green blood from their mouths with a trio of head butts before finding himself caught in three pairs of pincers and large, dripping mandibles gnawing on three of his faces. He would eventually detach himself from the captured heads as the mantises devoured them, leaving three long throats trailing from betwixt their mandibles as they chewed upon skulls and masticated brains. Hydraman retreated like a lizard that leaves its tail behind in the grasp of a predator to escape, then immediately grew three more heads to replace the ones that were being devoured by the mantid succubi.
Cerberus drooled blood in ten steady streams from the corners of his five mouths, growling, barking, and then lunging at Stingmeister. The wasp demon attempted to fly away but was caught by the back leg in the five-headed canine's jaws and thrown brutally to the ground, after which the hellhound continued to bash him repeatedly, raising him into the air with his fangs and then bringing him down violently, again and again and again.
The Oneirophage waited for Pestilentia to emerge from the debris of the temple, then severed the foot of one her forelegs as she flew past. Dodging the droppings of plasm falling to the ground, the Oneirophage lashed out with the battle scissors again, gashing the insectoid matriarch in the abdomen, but, this time, the blades got stuck in her flesh and the Oneirophage was carried into the air along with her, still clinging to the handles of the giant scissors.
The massive herds of animals in the fields had begun stamping their fee
t and trampling one another, and when a few of the Necrodelic's fireballs lighted in the grass after being deflected by the centipede warlord, they began a chaotic stampede, killing one another and knocking the battling demons and insects over in the process. Pestilentia swooped down amidst the anarchy to gather up her minions as the fires spread and the animals grew more crazed. Whereas the Necrodelic simply slashed the beasts to pieces whenever they came near him, and Hydraman kept them at bay with his headbutts, and Cerberus leapt onto their backs and broke their necks betwixt his black fangs, the insects, being more fragile and unaccustomed to fighting battles where they were outnumbered, were at a disadvantage. Pestilentia flew off with her minions safely inside the hive of her body. The Oneirophage dropped down as she took off into the skies, the giant scissors still protruding from her abdomen.
The Necrodelic, Oneirophage, Hydraman, and Cerberus spent the next several hours slaying virtually all of Elasvai's wildlife, then stood triumphant in the waning night over a massive battlefield of smoking, poisoned, perforated, broken, decapitated, artescerated, eviscerated, mutilated, and dismembered animal corpses. The carnage stretched for miles, from horizon to horizon. The stench of death was so enormous that it was visible, a black miasma rising like the mists of Erebus over the mass grave.
The Necrodelic and the Oneirophage used the glut of carcasses to satiate their addictions and heal the accretions of wounds they had suffered over the last several hours. Chariah walked among the dead like a funerary priest, breathing in the rising smoke of the immolated and cremated beasts as he traversed their ashes, inhaling the raw stuff of death which hung like a damp dark fog over the aceldama, using it to fuel his healing necromancies. His lacerations began to close, hermetically sealing themselves with neither scar nor suture. Broken and fractured bones did the same, and the rib stolen by the Oneirophage regenerated itself. Chariah restored and rebalanced his energies like the vampire and predator he was, a vampire who drank the blood of his victims in evaporated form rather than liquid, a predator who likewise devoured the flesh of his prey as gases rather than solids.