by Brant Danay
The Geryon Baal'Striga was as tall as the Fiendfarms, larger than the largest roc and blacker than the blackest crow. Her heads were the heads of giant vultures, with jaundiced and truculent eyes to match. Below those perspicacious and terrible eyes were three fanged beaks, each of which eternally masticated upon things morbid and macabre. The first beak chewed on severed penises, the bloody members dangling from its mouth like earthworms from a lesser bird, plucked from unwilling victims to be ruminated in her hideous maw. The second and central head chewed upon a pile of its own eggs, murdering its own children as they developed with the cold calculation of a cannibalistic mother. The third used its beak to devour both its own young and the young of others, from the newborn, blind, wet squawking hatchlings she pulled from her own womb to the embryos and fetuses she pulled from the wombs of her victims in the night, to the infants and children stolen from cradles, papooses, nests, and dens beneath the obfuscations of nocturnal darkness. Upon the three-headed thunderbird's chest was a cascade of beaked teats and nests like the pouches of marsupials. The nests were full of embryoes, fetuses, and newborns of all species, patterned as such that below each feathered breast was a nest, and the nests themselves rested in the cleavage of two other breasts, one to each side. There were hundreds of these black teats, each with a small beak upon its nipple that drizzled regurgitated blood and severed penises into the waiting mouths of a nestful of brood just below. Her vagina was huge and emitted the rotten smell of carrion, and it was said that everyone of her dark feathers had been plucked from a different lover at the precise instant of his demise, thus turning black with the energy of death, and then stuck like needles and stiletto blades into her own flesh. Her feet were the feet of vultures with the hooked claws of harpies, and each talon was capable of prehensile feats as well as evisceration. Of all these hideous aspects, however, it was the wings of the avian fertility demoness which were the most awesome, and it was these that the Tantradox coveted. Their wing-span measured hundreds of feet, and the pinions themselves were as durable as adamantium, capable of beating billions of times per second and thus enabling the three-headed thunderbird to soar through the universe at speeds much faster than light.
The Tantradox rode the crane back to the Stormtower, alighted upon its circular rooftop, and removed the hook from its womb with a spattering of blood. Junisia picked eelworms from her pubic hair and vagina while, overhead, the clouds continued to amass and then began to roil. Immediately after the crane deposited its passengers safely atop the Stormtower, it turned abruptly and sank its hook deep into the belly of the three-headed thunderbird. As the avian monstrosity struggled to free itself, the Tantradox descended into the depths of the Stormtower's control chambers. Moments later, a barrage of thunderbolts from the clouds above struck the three-headed thunderbird's body with terrible voltage, paralyzing and incapacitating the gargantuan flying succubus. The crane then spun the three-headed thunderbird's limp body around in mid-air so that its back faced the Stormtower. The Tantradox reemerged upon the Stormtower roof with twelve lengths of adamantium chains slung over its shoulders. Each chain was equipped with hooks and barbs the size of broadswords, and had been dipped in hot bituminous unguents. The Tantradox swung the chains over their heads and then, one by one, released them to fly like missiles through the air. They sank into the flesh of the avian fertility demoness at different points, one in the back of her head, one in each temple, one between skull and spine, two in the upper back, one in the middlemost vertebra, two in the lower back, one in the coccyx, and two in the tail. The sword-sized hooks and barbs lodged and anchored themselves deep inside her muscles and bones, and the scalding unguents fused adamantium and living tissue together into one inseparable, unbreakable mass. Drelrei and Junisia then threw the opposite ends of the chains, which were tipped with grapnels, into tiny holes bored into the underside of the crane's arm, where they stuck fast, holding the Geryon Baal'Striga captive.
The Tantradox climbed atop the crane, upon whose promontory was a wheel and four levers. Using these devices to control the movement of the crane, the Tantradox raised the Geryon Baal'Striga up by the chains embedded in its flesh and began to extend the entire contraption forward, the giant arm seemingly elongating as its hidden lengths were pulled to their limits from unseen depths within the citadel. Maneuvering the mechanical rigging to the front of the Fiendfarms, the Tantradox bore the Geryon Baal'Striga through the air until she was extended beyond the boundaries of the Fiendfarms and dangling directly over the Siamese twin brontosauruses that pulled the palace like an enormous chariot.
Drelrei pulled one of the levers, and a guillotine blade dropped from the arm of the crane, whistling as it fell on a long hempen rope before severing the leather leashes and reins which bound the conjoined reptiles to the Fiendfarms. Freed at last, the brontosauruses immediately stampeded into the distance and disappeared within the gardens of Elasvai.
The Tantradox reeled the guillotine blade back into its thin, groovelike sheath in the iron rigging. The winged Geryon Baal'Striga was now slowly lowered to the ground to take the place of the brontosauruses. Her black head jutted above the parapets of the Fiendfarm rooftops as her talons dug heavily into the flowerbeds and soil below. The Tantradox then abandoned the rigging which bound her, retreating back along its arm and alighting on a nearby balcony, then slipping through an entrance into the upper levels of the Fiendfarms, only to reemerge moments later through the same door with tall, hooked staffs. They used these staffs to disengage the grapnelled ends of the twelve chains which shackled the Geryon Baal'Striga's flesh to the mechanical rigging, guiding the adamantium ropes through the air and then reinserting them in metal rings studding the front walls of the Fiendfarms. These were then welded tight with hundred-foot long branding irons. A spiked adamantium choke collar was fastened around the avian fertility demoness' vulturine throat, then hermetically sealed by the heated instruments. A thirteenth chain was attached and suspended between collar and ringed wall. Finally, the Tantradox descended to the bottom floor of their citadel and walked down a short stairway to the ground. They held in their hands a large red-hot axe, which sizzled and steamed as they approached the bound Geryon Baal'Striga. With one mighty swing the incandescent axe amputated both of the Geryon Baal'Striga's legs, and its intense heat immediately cauterized the wounds in its wake, leaving two shriveled stumps that shrank back into the demoness' feathers. The Geryon Baal'Striga screamed as her legs were severed, and immediately began beating her mighty wings to keep herself aloft from the ground below. The Tantradox hurried back inside the Fiendfarms as the entire castle began to tremble and shake. The Geryon Baal'Striga's wings began beating faster and faster, and then suddenly the Fiendfarms lurched and the entire edifice lifted into the air.
The Tantradox emerged atop the Fiendfarms with whips in hand, flogging the Geryon Baal'Striga's three heads to change its speed, altitude, or direction. The avian fertility demoness soared through the skies with the Fiendfarms behind it like some titanic flying chariot. With its legs amputated it had been rendered an eternal martlet, and would never cease flying again until the time of its demise. The only landing it would ever make would be into its own deathbed or grave. Until then, it was the Tantradox's slave, and the Siamese twin incubus and succubus had obtained the power of flight. The Tantradox was now ready to wage war upon the Necrodelic and the Oneirophage, and then the entire universe.
41
The Tantradox flew the Megafiend from inside the Stormtower. No longer the Fiendfarms, the citadel had taken on a life of its own, as was evidenced by the sentient tissue of the artificial lake upon its rooftops, which continued to expand and grow upwards to accommodate the ever-enlarging Janus Kraken, as well as the system of nerves and ganglia now running through the fortress and into the shackles of the Geryon Baal'Striga, enabling Drelrei and Junisia to control the flight of the avian fertility demoness with electrical impulses and shocks as it dragged the castle through the skies like a soaring juggernaut.
Within the caudal Stormtower, the Tantradox controlled Elasvai's weather conditions. Long ago, Drelrei and Junisia had conquered and captured a weather warlock, bonded him psychically with the Elasvai's spirit, and mutated his flesh into a living control panel through which they could create and regulate the temperature and seasons of the garden planet, as well as cause, adjust, and terminate rainfall, lightning, thunderstorms, floods, waterspouts, winds, tornadoes, earthquakes, and eclipses. Thusly had they kept Elasvai in a state of perpetual bloom and flourishment for millennia.
They adjusted the living control panel now. Its levers were fingers, phalluses, blood vessels, esophagi, intestines, tails, and bones. Its buttons were pulsating organs. The severed head of the weather warlock served as an instrumental gauge, providing oral descriptions of various measurements, levels, and conditions throughout the entire planet. Pulling on phalanges, penises, veins, arteries, entrails, esophagi, tails, and pieces of extracted skeleton, while simultaneously pressing, tapping, prodding, or gripping beating hearts, breathing lungs, digesting stomach sacs, churning livers, quivering kidneys, trembling spleens, expanding bladders, and hundreds of various glands, the Tantradox controlled the weather with a secret tactile language of applied touches, numbered repetitions, and esoteric sequential orders which they had invented long ago and were known by none save the severed head of the weather warlock. He interpreted these various signals by their ordered chronological tappings, musical rhythms, degrees of pressure, stimulation of both pleasure and pain centers, forced glandular secretions and various types of bloodlettings, which he then translated to the spirit of the planet. The Tantradox had now brought much of Elasvai under the cover of cumulus clouds, thunderheads waiting to be unleashed, rainstorms brewing in the skies. Drelrei and Junisia set specific weather patterns and storms for every section of Elasvai, controlling every minute detail of the planet's climate. After several hours, when all the clouds had accumulated over the planet, the Tantradox unleashed the rain and headed into battle.
*
The Oneirophage imbibed the dreams of cocaine demons on the Cliffs of Caine. Albinos as white as their beloved drugs, many of them had not descended from the cliffs in centuries. A pair of Siamese twins, joined at the head, lay broken and bloodied beneath the coca plants as the Oneirophage ravished their minds. The dream-eater plunged the Umbilicus through both their skulls at once, driving the tip into the ear canal of the first until it emerged from the ear canal of the second, sucking a tunnel through their brain, and imbibing their cocaine dreams and withdrawal nightmares all the while. He saw hourglasses whose sands were cocaine, then the deserts those dwindling white granules had come from, shifting in the rhythmic wind, blowing first east, then west, then east again, and so on unto infinity. He withdrew his straw and left the cocaine demons to die with bright red blood dripping from their ears and noses, staining their lily-white flesh.
Another pair of cocaine demons, joined at the hip, were ambling up the cliffside. The Oneirophage crawled behind the large stem of a giant coca plant and lay in wait for his prey, then ambushed them with a cobra strike that paralyzed them in mid-gait. These cocaine demons had white horns, which the Oneirophage tore off, and then plunged the Umbilicus into the bloody holes left behind. He swallowed dreams of scales that were balanced by piles of cocaine, forever shifting up and down, their fulcrum a beating heart that palpitated with increasing rapidity as the scales swung back and forth.
Ascending the Cliffs of Caine, the Oneirophage found two albino soulmates dangling from the branches while joined in the sexual yin-yang position, forever welded in simultaneous fellacio and cunnilingus. Upon closer examination, he found that the lips of the male had been seamlessly fused to the labia of the female, and her pallid mouth had been likewise hermetically sealed around the base of his turgid phallus. The cocaine demons had rigged up an elaborate system of coca ingestion, with the twigs, vines and roots of the surrounding plants inserted into their nostrils and the veins in the insides of their elbows, feeding them cocaine intravenously while holding them aloft in the branches above the ground as they made love. The male hung supine, the female prone above him. The bone-white addicts had strung themselves up by the branches of coca trees and given themselves a continuous supply of cocaine, a perpetual state of stimulation that had lasted for years.
The Oneirophage plunged his straw into the skull of the male, opening a new, crimson fontanel in his head to replace the one that had sealed itself after his birth. Through this gory, surgically created fontanel, the Oneirophage sucked the very white lightning of his victim's orgasm, suffusing his entire body. He jabbed the Umbilicus all over the unpigmented flesh of both, sucking all the cocaine from their bloodstreams and all the sexual energy from their genitals and nervous system. The Oneirophage shuddered with paroxysms of orgasm, as though in a convulsive fit. He left the sexually conjoined Siamese twins alive, but full of bloody perforations and vampirically drained of the cocaine and hormones in their systems. With all the coca plants surrounding them now barren, the drugs sucked from their leaves and stems into the Oneirophage through the conduit of their bodies, the cocaine demons were left in a state of agonizing withdrawal, screaming, sweating, shivering, and shaking, the male's phallus now flaccid in his lover's dry and parched mouth, and she leaking blood between the cracked lips of his. They would both be dead within an hour.
Paranoid cocaine demons fled the Oneirophage as he approached. He enjoyed hunting them down and sucking the speeding dreams from their intoxicated brains, dreams with an acrid hint of nightmare, which made them more delectable. The Oneirophage emerged onto the uppermost precipice of the Cliffs of Caine, which was also the uppermost precipice of the entire planet, and gazed out upon the Elasvaian nocturne. He watched as cumulus clouds gathered, huge thunderheads rising up like ramparts on the horizon. He could taste the moisture gathering within the clouds on his forked tongues. Storms meant rain, which meant rainbows, which meant prisms, which meant dreaming. The approaching storms were very much to the Oneirophage's advantage. Smiling to himself as the first drops began to spatter down, the Oneirophage enjoyed the scenery a moment more, then reached for the Darkprism around his neck, removed it and the necklace it dangled from, and planted it in the dirt of the cliff's edge. He stood over it like a pyrolater, lighting and then fanning the flames of a sacred fire, making sorcerous gesticulations and emitting sibilant hissing incantations, and then from out of its black hole depths grew a towering, spinning iron crucifix, the gigantic ancient artifact from the temples of Serpentikal, a relic from his destroyed homeworld of Grystiawa, which he had borne with him ever since the death of his birthplace had necessitated his exile into space. The revolving cross arose from the Darkprism, drilling itself upwards through the night until it had reached its full height. After retrieving the Darkprism from beneath it and replacing the talisman around his neck, the Oneirophage coiled his lower, serpentine half around the base of the monolithic crucifix and then climbed, curled, and slithered his way to its top. He draped his arms over the crossbar and crucified himself on the giant spinning relic. Looming hundreds of feet above the Cliffs of Caine, and miles above the Elasvaian plains, the Oneirophage awaited the coming apocalypse with cold reptilian patience.
*
Chariah made his way from the north pole of Elasvai with Cerberus at his side, walking directly over the planet's meridian and glaring with crimson eyes at the gathering clouds. Heading slowly south, through gardens of mandrake and forests of weeping willows, he could feel as well as hear the growl of Cerberus in response to the distant thunder. The Necrodelic held out his black hand as the first drops of rain began to fall, and looked skyward with eyes like the calderas of volcanoes about to erupt. He looked at the glistening beads of water on his hand, listened to the soft ricochet of raindrops on leaves, and felt the light, dewy dampness clinging to his long sable hair.
"Fuck," he said to himself, and continued onward.
*
On the entire plan
et of Elasvai, no one saw the sunrise that day except the Oneirophage and the Tantradox. The Oneirophage's spinning crucifix just cleared the tops of the cumulus clouds, and he watched Dzandra emerge from the distant horizons as he revolved. Dawn shattered across the sky like a jewel obliterated by a warhammer, glittering in the Oneirophage's peripheral vision as the giant cross spun him around. The next time he gazed upon Dzandra, it was through the eyes of Morpheus Rex.
The Tantradox, meanwhile, watched the sunrise from the rooftop parapets of the Megafiend, the Geryon Baal'Striga flying them above the clouds as they tracked the dream-eater. When Dzandra rose, it revealed in its hemisphere of saffron brilliance the silhouette of a towering crucifix, and upon that crucifix, the transforming shadow of the Oneirophage as he made his diurnal metamorphosis into Morpheus Rex. The Tantradox lashed its whip across the side of the Geryon Baal'Striga's face, and the Megafiend hurtled directly toward the iron cross, seemingly on a collision course with the sun.
That collision course would take them directly through the flesh of Morpheus Rex as well. The Tantradox flogged their avian steed thrice about the back, spurring it onward to faster and faster speeds. Morpheus Rex remained on his excruciating perch and took the full force of the rocketing Geryon Baal'Striga and the weight of the entire edifice in the face and chest. The giant iron cross was blasted from its foundation and toppled heavily down the Cliffs of Caine, flattening hundred-foot coca plants and crushing cocaine demons in its wake.
The Tantradox glanced around but could find no trace of Morpheus Rex. It would be several moments before they heard a faint rustling behind them, and the Siamese twins turned just in time for Drelrei to block the Prismsword with the Soul Cleaver. Morpheus Rex spun, and Junisia raised the handheld iron maiden to block his path, using it as a shield to keep the dripping fangs of the black widow which was Morpheus Rex's left hand away from her face, then pressing the lever in its handle to make it open and close like the jaws of a rabid dragon. Morpheus Rex feinted and lunged sideways with his spider hand repeatedly, until finally he mistimed his strike and Junisia trapped his arm all the way to the elbow.