by Brant Danay
The saurian spaceship landed mere feet from the fabled gardens, and the seven demons descended Serpentikal's throat to emerge before it. The Hanging Garden of Aphrodisia was composed of tiers and terraces that rose beyond the limits of vision into the aurora astralis, within which it disappeared. Its outer walls were wrapped in vines bearing grapes of every color, some larger than their skulls, and from these dripping grapes was formed a moat of wine. They made their way onto the large lingham drawbridge, which protruded over the moat but reached only halfway across before abruptly terminating with a phallus tip that dripped wine from its urethra. The entrance to the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia was a gated yoni several feet above their heads, a constricted tunnel of labia too small for them to pass through even if they could reach it.
The reptiles strode and slithered to the edge of the bridge. The Oneirophage paused to produce the Umbilicus from the sheath of flesh in his right wrist, twirling his fingers until it appeared. He blew into the Umbilicus to elongate it, then began to sip the purple wine from the moat. Imbibing heavily of the intoxicating liquid, the Oneirophage found his body grow not only warm, but hot, as though with fever. His two penises immediately hardened into erections. The wine had an instant aphrodisiac effect, and the Oneirophage passed the Umbilicus to Hydraman, in whose claws the sorcerous straw apparatus multiplied itself ninefold, allowing him to simultaneously partake of the sweet alcoholic elixir with every dragonhead. When he had had his fill, Hydraman passed the Umbilicus to the gorgons and the lamias, who then partook of the wine themselves.
Moments later, the six of them were inebriated and suffused with sexual cravings, entangled in a twisted mass which included the preserved cadaver of the Constrictress, as well. As they writhed in a snakepit of orgy, the lingham drawbridge began to lengthen and rise into the air. As the orgy intensified, the phallic bridge raised them to the yoni gateway high above, which itself had dilated with arousal. The large phallus began to ejaculate wine, splattering the vined walls and trellises before it, then plunged coitally into the zenithal vagina, and as orgasms were achieved, the serpent brood was delivered to the entrance of the gardens.
They rode the lingham drawbridge high into the air, and then passed through the irising labial entrance and into the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia. Once within, they paused to admire the towering tesserations and ubiquitous flora, picking grapes from the vines along the walls that were every bit as potent as the wines they produced. Giant fronds and ferns overlooked high terraces, while flowers, berries, and fruits bloomed on plants and vines that hung down from every ceiling like the tresses of a fertility demoness. The air was filled with clouds of pollen, visible masses that were inhaled by the thousands and which, like everything else within the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia, aroused the lust of those who breathed them. The Oneirophage, Hydraman, and their gorgon and lamia consorts devoured everything in their paths, from grasses and flowers to berries and fruits to seeds and spores, engaging in frequent orgies as they made their way up stairways which ascended alongside the rivers and cataracts of red and purple wine, as well as streams of amber honey, which dripped from the pleasure hives of incubus bees and their succubus queens.
After partaking of the aphrodisiac honey, they were compelled to enter one of the pleasure hives. Inside were pools full of honey and walls lined with shackles and whips. The Oneirophage and Hydraman bound the five females to the hive walls, then proceeded to flay them with the whips provided by the sex slaves of the queen bee. The Oneirophage then raped a lamia while Hydraman raped a gorgon, then the Oneirophage raped a gorgon while Hydraman raped a lamia, then both raped the corpse of the Constrictress simultaneously. Later, the Oneirophage took his turn in the chains and cuffs, simultaneously flogged by gorgons, lamias, and Hydraman alike.
After departing the pleasure hive, they made their way through tiers and terraces to a field of dandelions, whose spores were grains of cocaine, driplets of opium, and perfumed pleasuredust. The Oneirophage sodomized Hydraman while Hydraman performed cunnilingus simultaneously upon the gorgons, the lamias, and the deceased Constrictress with five of his dragon mouths. A gorgon and lamia performed fellacio upon the Oneirophage's twin tattooed penises while Hydraman sodomized the dream eater, and the other gorgon and lamia writhed in a lesbian mating ball nearby. The Oneirophage plunged both his penises into the Constrictress' vagina. After the dream-eater had withdrawn himself from her corpse, Hydraman took his place. The Oneirophage then proceeded to make love to a gorgon and a lamia, simultaneously, with his twin penises. The pollen, cocaine, opium, and pleasuredust swirled around them in larger and thicker clouds as aphrodisiac dandelions disintegrated beneath their bodies and thrashing limbs, penetrating their skin and orifices and intensifying both lust and orgasm.
They finally made their way to the upper terraces, where silkworms wove lingerie for the females, corsettes that raised their swollen breasts and covered their bodies in lace while binding their hands and feet submissively. The gorgons' serpent hair rose straight up from their scalps in individual black negligees like sexual headdresses, releasing more of their venomous pheromones into the air and tantalizing the Oneirophage and Hydraman. In the middle of the topmost terrace, the zenith of the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia, was a raised dais with the ancient sexual yin-yang sigil drawn in its center. Upon this dais, within this sigil, the orgy continued, serpentine limbs, tongues, hair, and phalluses entangled like a Gordian knot of leviathans' tentacles, melting the silk wrappings adorning the gorgons and lamias with a combination of heat and friction.
Throughout alternating rings of analingus and oral sex, the stone dais began to shift and rise into the air. The sound of grinding stones was loud throughout the entire gardens as tantric energies seeped into the sorcerous sigil. As all seven, including the dead Constrictress, were joined and psychically bonded in multiple simultaneous orgasms, the yin-yang sigil began to glow, and the ancient gravitronic mechanism was activated. The entire Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia rotated within itself like a puzzle box, turning upside-down while it reversed its own polarities and gravities until it hung from the underbelly of Elasvai into outer space, freed of the South Pole and the planet's magnetic field by the tantric energies and metamorphosing into a garden which truly did hang, dangling out over the universe.
The zenith of the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia had become its nadir. Flowers, vines, fronds, and trees were all turned upside-down and wavered in the pull of outer space. A hail of twigs and blossoms fell into the starlit cosmos below. The Oneirophage wrapped the corpse of the Constrictress around the branch of a weeping willow, his other hand twining itself with a knot of inkvine, as the vacuum of space threatened to suck him into its void. The mouths of a lamia and gorgon remained clenched around his phalluses, hanging on for life. Their weight and desperate movements not only inhibited his ability to climb back to safety, but like drowning victims, threatened to pull him down along with them.
The serpentine lower body of the lamia thrashed as she choked on his sperm, his venomous semen filling her lungs and throat and lubricating her mouth until she began to lose her grip and dug her fangs into the tattooed flesh of the Oneirophage's genitals. This brought the Oneirophage to orgasm, one which he suffused with his sorcery and discharged like a powerful pneuma. The force of his ejaculation blasted the damned lamia, screaming and writhing, into outer space.
The gorgon desperately held onto his upper penis, clutching and scrabbling at his scales while her legs frantically kicked at the void. Finally, her violent thrashing caused the scales of the Oneirophage's phallus to dislodge, and then the dream-eater performed a sudden ecdysis to free himself from her extra weight, sloughing off his topmost phallus' layer of integument and sending the gorgon to her doom with an empty snakeskin in her deathgrip, her serpent-hair flailing as she fell and dwindled from sight.
Hydraman, facing similar jeopardy, had held on by biting the branches and vines above, unhinging his jaws like those of boa constrictors, and clenching hi
s mouths around them, so that he dangled by his nine dragonheads, suspended in space. A lamia upon whom he had been performing cunnilingus now hung upside-down from his central head, her thighs wrapped tightly around his neck like a sexual strangler. A gorgon also continued to perform fellacio upon him, while they hung as though from a sadomasochistic gallows. For several minutes, the trio remained intertwined, Hydraman trying to climb his way back up into the gardens, until a shower of pink lotus poured over them, stimulating Hydraman unto further heights of aphrodisia. Like the Oneirophage, he gathered and focused the energies of his body and unleashed them in an orgasm so strong that the ejaculation of his sperm blew the gorgon several feet into space, blasting her into the distance to flail helplessly while being sucked away by the cosmos.
The lamia, meanwhile, had slid all the way down to the candelabra-like base of Hydraman's nine necks and hung upside-down against his torso. As Hydraman struggled to climb to safety, her grip became more and more tenuous, until her thighs slipped from around his central throat. The lamia did a quick flip in mid-air and caught onto Hydraman's member with her fanged mouth to prevent herself from plummeting into the waiting cosmos. An instant later, however, she did exactly that, as Hydraman discharged his phallus to rid himself of her excess weight just like a lizard would its tail. She fell with his detached genitalia in her mouth, watching Hydraman regrow a new penis even as she was whisked away with his old one clenched between her jaws.
The Oneirophage made his way back to the sigil by climbing the vines, using the corpse of the Constrictress like a grapnel at times, with Hydraman following. Both pressed on the sigil while they dangled precariously, but could not reverse its effects on the gravity of the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia. As showers of leaves and flower petals poured down around them, the Oneirophage emitted an ultrasonic hiss. Moments later, the Metasaur was beneath him, and he dropped into the waiting mouth of his figurehead, Serpentikal, still carrying the embalmed Constrictress with him. Hydraman released his nine mouths from the various branches, vines, and fronds that he had clamped onto and fell into the Serpentopolis, where he quickly took refuge inside the coiling labyrinthine city.
As Serpentikal turned his gargantuan head and flew the living spaceship back toward the surface of Elasvai, the gravity in the Hanging Gardens of Aphrodisia returned to normal. For a moment it hung suspended from the south pole of the garden planet like the green entrails of a fertility demon's underbelly, an upside-down jungle, a true hanging garden, then reversed itself with a grinding of stone and a rearrangement of tiers and terraces, until all was as it had been before the rites of serpentine perversion had been performed within its walls.
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With oneiromantic voodoo the Constrictress was resurrected. From her sepulchral serpentarium, a large transparent glass tank filled with cold embalming fluids, in which she floated as though on display in a menagerie of dead animals, the Oneirophage had extracted her cadaver and revived it with his dark sorceries. Preserved since her death on Grystiawa in ophidian formaldehyde-a melange of caustic venoms from acid-spewing cobras and wine distilled from the blood of gorgons, mixed together and then oxidized with the final breaths of dying dipsas-the Constrictress had neither decayed nor decomposed since her demise.
The Oneirophage removed the Constrictress from her incubative sarcophagus, carefully lowered her limp form to the prism floor of the chamber, and began performing ancient rites of revivification upon her corpse. He placed her in a pentagram drawn with the freshly spilled blood of sacrificial boa constrictors, then called her soul back to her body with arcane and sibilant chantings, all the while shaking dead rattlesnakes in each of his hands. With interdimensional hypnotic suggestions and the power of his dream-fueled sorceries, the Oneirophage summoned the spirit of the Constrictress back to her flesh. The Oneirophage then used the Umbilicus to resuscitate the ophidian virago, blowing the breath of life back into her lungs with rhythmic pneumas. Her heart restarted in her chest, her green eyelids fluttered open, and the Oneirophage had raised the dead.
He took his zombie lover to a tryst in Candiru Falls. The crepitus of the Constrictress' broken bones scraped the air as the Oneirophage led her across the verdant, blooming planet. Sculpted by the Necrodelic into a giant, living pentagram, the Oneirophage had unfolded her corpse and rearranged her internally dismembered skeleton into its original form before preserving it, but the embalming fluid was neither a curative nor a remedy, and thus her bones remained as they had been in the moment of her demise: cracked, splintered, and sundered.
The undead Constrictress, however, was capable of perceiving only a modicum of the physical suffering she would have if fully alive, and she seemed apathetic towards the pain which she did experience. The Oneirophage led her like a child and a familiar to the waterfalls, where azure pools shimmered beneath the moonlight like open eyes. Within the cascading cataracts could be seen the tiny, slender forms of the black catfish, plummeting with the surging waters to the pond below, which was teeming with their quill-like silhouettes.
The Oneirophage waded into the swarming lagoon. The candiru shot like magnets through the currents once the Oneirophage and the Constrictress were waist-deep within the water. The stiletto-like catfish swam directly into their genitals, painfully lodging themselves like intravenous needles in their urethras. Once inside, they clamped their fangs down upon the tender flesh therein and there they remained, drinking blood like larvae.
The twin penises of the serpentine Oneirophage hardened and grew swollen with erection, leaking tiny trickles of crimson from their zeniths. The pain invigorated the masochistic dream-eater. The Constrictress found herself with a wombful of the wriggling bloodsuckers, biting and attaching to her vaginal walls and membranes, swimming inside and drinking her blood from within. When there was no more room for the candiru, they dangled from betwixt her labia her like a mass of slender black tentacles.
The Oneirophage embraced the Constrictress, uncoiled her elongated arms and wrapped them around his body as though he were a living caduceus staff. He slipped his first penis, turgid with parasites as well as sex, its tip red with irritation, into his undead boa constrictor lover. His phallus plunged through the candirus and, with genitals infested by the acicular, piscid vampires, the Oneirophage and the Constrictress made love. The Oneirophage used his second penis to sodomize the Constrictress before shoving it into her crowded womb alongside its twin. Ejaculation was difficult due to the candiru, sometimes retrograde, turning back into his body and splashing his bladder and innards. Blood flowed from their joined sexes as they made love, tingeing the ponds of Candiru Falls with scarlet, and attracting hordes of the thirsty fish in feeding frenzies around their bodies.
The Oneirophage twirled the Umbilicus from its sheath in his wrist and impaled the Constrictress through the forehead with its tip. As they made love, he suckled upon her dreams, preserved within her brain as surely as her flesh had been preserved within the ophidian formaldehyde. The Oneirophage drank flashbacks of that fateful battle on Grystiawa, reminiscing about his home planet and the glorious war that had led to its destruction. He imbibed glimpses of Hell as well, where the Constrictress was tied to four torture racks at once and stretched for eons, until her arms, tail, and head were thinner than the candiru which infested her flesh. He devoured more dreams through the straw, and saw Satan looking on through flames as the Constrictress was forced to crush herself in her own coils. Satan laughed as he watched, making eye contact through the dimensions as he voyeuristically watched his dream-eating, serpentine progeny. The Oneirophage wilted from that incandescent and terrible eye contact and withdrew the straw from the Constrictress' skull, returning it to the small slit in his forearm before refocusing all of his energies upon his zombie lover.
As midnight crested through the starlit skies above, the Oneirophage expelled the candiru from his tattooed penises, the replicas of Satan and serpent which covered them expectorating the slender parasites from their mouths while the Constrictr
ess performed fellacio upon him, her boa constrictor jaws unhinging to encompass his genitalia the same way they would to swallow a large piece of prey, so that they could accommodate the Oneirophage's twin phalluses simultaneously. She swallowed the candiru along with the Oneirophage's powerful jetstream of ophidian seed mere moments before the voodoo spell that had been cast upon her corpse dissipated. Her soul returned once more to the realms of the dead, leaving behind a cadaver with a belly full of water and live candiru, swimming around inside her stomach sac as if it were an aquarium.
Moments later, the Oneirophage sucked all the candirus from the pond into his Darkprism, then dragged the carcass of the Constrictress from the waters by the tail, to the shores of Candiru Falls and through the flowerbeds and gardens and jungles, like vanquished prey from a successful hunt, back to his waiting spaceship and passed through the body of Serpentikal to the Serpentopolis within. The eyes of the giant figurehead glared down angrily upon its master as he approached, bearing the violated corpse of its soulmate into its underbelly and passing through the gates of scales and flesh therein. Serpentikal continued to glower unseen as he was commanded to rise from the ground and launch into the skies, his eyeballs two clenched fists of wrath in their sockets as he obediently soared through the night.
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Drelrei and Junisia had retreated to the sanctuary of their birthplace, the Fiendfarms, within whose palatial laboratories and abattoirs the crippled lovers hid themselves in shame and agony, humiliated and sundered into bloody halves by the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage. Isolated therein for several days, Drelrei and Junisia comforted one another with tantric sex and post-coital plots of vengeance, as well as pornographically sculpted pipes full of opium and similarly engraved chalices of nepenthe. For the first time in years, they made love as two entities, each feeling the unbearable pangs of separation in their souls as well as their bodies, druglike withdrawal symptoms and addictive cravings for conjoinment racking their flesh like illness and poison. Weakened and feverish, sweating, shaking, vomiting, and hallucinating, their bodies covered in oozing sores and trembling with violent paroxysms, Drelrei and Junisia needed each other like vampires needed blood, like shamans needed psilocybin and peyote. Addicted to one another, the soulmates were one another's ambrosia, panacea, aphrodisiac, intoxicant, analgesic, stimulant, depressant, and psychedelic all at once. Drelrei and Junisia were one another's medicine, one another's cure for the anguish of existence, the torment of the universe, and their tantric demonic powers were dependent upon their spiritual oneness and the conjoinment of their flesh as Siamese twins as surely as the Necrodelic depended upon the flesh he smoked and the Oneirophage depended upon the dreams he devoured.