by Brant Danay
Suddenly, the Megafiend rocked as though it had been struck by a meteor. The Necrodelic saw Serpentikal speeding towards the Megafiend at the last minute, and braced himself within the chains for the collision. All the meathooks of the abattoir swung wildly about, tangling and knotting and crashing into one another. One buried itself painfully in Chariah's thigh, but he dared not reach down and extract it.
The Tantradox swung crazily from its flaming, broken, dripping knee, hanging on by a few thin shreds of sinew that were ripping and thinning by the moment. The Geryon Baal'Striga reared to the side as the Oneirophage rammed the Megafiend with his own sentient vessel. Large chunks of white stone loosened and fell like boulders. A second later, the entire Megafiend fell to the ground, landing upright and intact, but laced with cracks and fissures. The body of the Geryon Baal'Striga was pinned beneath it, trapped under its front turret, with the weight of the entire edifice crushing her back, spine, and tail.
The force of the crash-landing severed the Tantradox's leg at the knee, leaving its amputated part behind, spitted upon the meathook like a cannibal's sweetmeat, oozing blood and blackened pus. The sign of the pentagram having been sundered and destroyed, the Hellfire immediately abated. The Tantradox tumbled to the ground below.
The Tantradox rose to its feet and began limping through the abattoir. Meanwhile, the Oneirophage was ramming the fortress again, making it shiver like earthquakes and poltergeists. The Necrodelic had disappeared once more into the chains and hooks, and the Tantradox was not foolish enough to believe he had died in the crash. Warily, Drelrei and Junisia made their way through the slaughterhouse, Drelrei using the dangling chains for leverage to compensate for his amputated leg. Every rustle of iron, every flicker of shadow, made the Tantradox's skin jump. They scanned the hanging slaughterhouse constantly with all four eyes, peering around dying beasts and large slabs of meat before continuing on. Cautiously, the wounded Siamese twins made their exit, spreading the last row of meathooks open with both hands to make one last desperate attempt at survival.
The Necrodelic crawled along the ceiling like a fly, as smooth as a shadow, slipping in and out of darknesses, creeping upside-down like a spider. He traveled unseen and unheard. He rustled neither chain nor hook. His claws, hands, and feet made no sound upon the ceiling, nor the shackles inserted within. At no point was any part of his body glimpsed, not even his shadow. He did not breathe as he stalked, nor did his heart beat. Completely silent and undetected, he arrived at the place where he calculated the Drelrei and Junisia would make their exit long before they did. Like a drop of liquid night, he swung down directly in front of them. Dangling by his fists from two chains, he slowly lowered himself in front of the frozen Tantradox, extending the full length of his black body before them with perfect muscle control, flexing his chiseled biceps and triceps, straightening himself before the four eyes of the terrified Siamese twins so that they could behold him for one last time in all his evil splendor, then dropping quietly to his feet before them.
The Tantradox swung drunkenly from the meathook chains they grasped and started to retreat. Chariah fixed his crimson eye contact upon them, and their four eyes began to smoke and melt. The Tantradox stumbled, entangled in the chains, then began to flee as best it could with its missing leg. The Necrodelic let them run for a couple moments more, remembering how they had bound and gagged him during those intolerable hours of dragging torture. He let their primal animal fear reach a precipitous stiletto zenith, their heartbeat accelerating to a crimson, palpitating crescendo, hormones and endorphins coursing through their veins like venom and overdoses of psychedelic drugs, and then the demon charged.
Chariah brushed aside chains and meathooks as he raced through the abattoir, his lips curled back over his shimmering black fangs in a silent, feral growl. He knocked aside corpses and living meat with furious intensity, leaving many on the ground in his wake, sidestepping swinging hooks with frightening dexterity as he wove his way through the labyrinth, zeroing in on his prey. The last several yards between the Tantradox and himself the Necrodelic took at a full sprint, spearing them in the chest like a black comet and running straight through them, hoisting them into the air as he did so and then sinking his claws into their armpits to bear them cruciform through the abattoir at blinding speed. Chains became silver flashes, meathooks grinning madness, swinging before and behind them, each one hurtling with its sharp point extended as if it desired to be the one that skewered the Tantradox. Corpses and slabs of meat became nightmarish ephemera, gruesome dripping phantasmagoria spinning insanely around their heads. The entire abattoir blurred past the dilated, frantic eyes of the Tantradox as the Necrodelic bore them in one extended taurean fit of battering ram insanity that seemed to last for hours, yet took place in mere seconds. Meathooks swung back and forth, narrowly avoiding them but gradually coming closer and closer. It was as though they were sprinting through tunnels of falling guillotine blades, dropping faster and faster and faster and faster. The Necrodelic ran with the Tantradox crucified on his claws until, finally, two twin, glinting meathooks hung directly in their path. The Necrodelic quickened with one final burst of speed, charging forward, drunk on death, and impaled the Tantradox on both of the meathooks, one through the back of Drelrei and one through the back of Junisia.
The Tantradox swung crazily from the meathooks, causing all the other meathooks around them to clash and ricochet and tangle. The meathooks dug deep into the flesh of the Tantradox, impaling them through their entrails and stomachs, severing their spines, and protruding from their torsoes through their solar plexuses. Blood rained as they hung, in drip-drop patterns on the ground. Trying to scream, they coughed up blood, then vomited more blood down their chests.
The Necrodelic stood before them with black patience, waiting for the meathooks to swing back. When they did, he reached up and seized Drelrei's genitals with his left hand.With one violent motion he castrated the incubus, ripping off his immense phallus and his ten testicles, then holding them up bleeding and dripping in his hand like a trophy. As the Tantradox looked on, swaying gently now from the meathooks, Chariah closed his fist around the severed genitals, squeezing them to a crimson pulp that leaked between his fingers and ran down his arm. When the Necrodelic opened his palm, there was nothing left except bloodstains, scarlet droplets, and thin shriveled bits of skin falling lightly to the ground.
As the Tantradox watched in horror, Chariah reached towards the ceiling with his right hand and grasped the heretofore unnoticed hilt of the Soul Cleaver, which had remained stuck in the stone of the ceiling where he'd sheathed it. He drew the crimson blade down while the Tantradox's eyes dilated even further, and they began to weep uncontrollably, for they knew the doom that was to come. Silently, Chariah gripped the handle of the sorcerous broadsword with both hands. He raised it over his head, and then brought it down with one swift, arching strike that landed between the heads of Drelrei and Junisia at the exact spot of their surgical conjoinment, then sliced the Tantradox in half as cleanly as razorwire and as suddenly as a thunderbolt, so that the crimson blade of the Soul Cleaver resheathed itself in the ground just as it had been sheathed moments ago in the ceiling above. The severed bodies of the Tantradox swung wildly on their meathooks, swinging and twisting and colliding as blood and teardrops poured onto the ground. Chariah finally brought their ricocheting, dismembered bodies to a halt with his black palms. He established eye contact with each of them one last time, forever branding his face upon their souls, and then he plunged his right hand into the vagina of Junisia and his left hand into the gaping castration wound of Drelrei. With a spray of blood, his hands forced their way upwards, leaving Junisia's womb in tatters and Drelrei's thoracic cavity in shreds. His arms shot violently through their bodies, his claws tearing through every organ, tissue, and bone in their path, until the Necrodelic's arms were buried almost to the shoulders inside his prey. His fists closed around their thundering hearts, and then he withdrew his arms from their bodies
in an explosion of gore, artescerating them through vagina and castrated crotch simultaneously.
Chariah held his arms out cruciform as Drelrei and Junisia died, a heart in each hand, and then, with his head tilted back in ecstasy, he squeezed each heart to a liquid pulp in his fists, feeling them explode in his palms. He raised his arms slowly overhead, still cruciform, so that the blood could run all over his body, and he stayed in that position for one timeless, eternal moment, deep in a meditative trance, surging with glorious black energies in the psychedelic intoxication of a vengeance exacted and a mission complete.
An eternity later, Chariah returned to his senses to find the Megafiend being rammed by the Oneirophage once again, and beginning to lift off the ground. He quickly removed the corpses of the Tantradox from the meathooks, slinging Junisia's limp carcass over his right shoulder and Drelrei's over his left. As the Geryon Baal'Striga began beating her wings and the Megafiend took flight again, Chariah was left standing all alone in the middle of the garden planet. He whistled once for the Omnibeast, entered through the mouth of the Overdragon, and disappeared.
Meanwhile, the Oneirophage and Hydraman stood in the cavernous maw of Serpentikal, continuously ramming the stationary Megafiend until Serpentikal was bruised and ensanguined. The blows dislodged the tail of the Geryon Baal'Striga from beneath its frontal turret, and the terrified, wounded avian fertility demoness began frantically beating her wings. The Megafiend budged and then was airborne once more, with Serpentikal following in close pursuit.
The two halves of the Janus Kraken had been assimilated into Phantasmagorika and were now part of the Oneirophage's bestial spaceship, forming the second and third figureheads of the nearly-completed Metasaur. The reptilian spaceship sped through the skies at greater speeds than ever before, in pursuit of the three-headed thunderbird and the Megafiend. The wounded monstrosity was only able to flee for a few minutes, and then the Oneirophage urged the Metasaur to ram her and her attached edifice at the speed of light. The blow severed the Geryon Baal'Striga from the Megafiend and the avian demon fell dead through the skies. The fortress of the Megafiend itself was sent spinning into space from the force of the blow, careening through the atmosphere and breaking the bonds of the dying planet's waning gravitational pull to spiral derelictly into the unknown depths of the cosmos.
The Oneirophage now skimmed the surface of Elasvai in his reptilian spaceship, sucking up its remaining live organisms with his Darkprism before the Necrodelic destroyed the planet. As he soared past a bloodstained garden, the flicker of a glittering, crimson edge caught his attention. He looked closely, and saw that the Soul Cleaver had been sheathed in a freshly-spilled puddle of blood.
The Darkprism, when used from a distance, could only absorb organic matter, so he would have to retrieve the sword by hand. There was little time left, but the Soul Cleaver was a precious bauble and powerful relic that he felt he must possess, to accompany the handheld iron maiden which was already displayed in his weapons gallery.
Directing Serpentikal to land the Metasaur, the Oneirophage clambered quickly down snake king's massive throat and rushed over to the ensorcelled blade. Pulling on its hilt, he lifted it from the ground and turned to ascend back into his spaceship, but the Metasaur was already lifting off without him.
With a piercing and cacophonous susurration the Oneirophage ran the short distance to where Serpentikal was rising. He leapt into the air, but the Metasaur was faster. His long fingernails scraped Serpentikal's underbelly, but he was already at the apex of his leap, hundreds of feet in the air. He whipped out the Umbilicus and shot the straw apparatus out like a grappling hook. It lodged in the ridged scales of Serpentikal's underbelly, and he began to pull himself up.
Just then, another Umbilicus, identical to his in shape and sorcerous power, shot down from Serpentikal's mouth and dislodged his own. A pneuma then blasted through the alien straw into his like a gust of wind, sending him plummeting back to the ground. As he looked up, he caught a glimpse of himself in Serpentikal's maw, and Siamese twin brontosauruses atop the giant ophidian figurehead's hood. Morpheus Rex had stolen the Metasaur.
The Oneirophage fell to the ground as the Hellfires began. He watched the Omnibeast orbit Elasvai like a black moon, spreading flames across the garden planet. The Overdragon hurled fireballs while the Necrodelic performed his pyromancies from its sulfurous maw, raising massive conflagrations, giant firewalls, and blazing tsunamis, as well as unleashing spontaneous combustions and random explosions. The Necrodelic was bringing Hell to Elasvai. Unfortunately for the Oneirophage, it looked as though this very same act of destruction was going to bring him to Hell.
The Oneirophage lay himself down in a flowerbed of blue asphodel and black crocus and prepared to die. He breathed in the perfumes of burning drugs as the gardens blazed all around him and all across the planet, and relaxed. At peace and at one, he closed his eyes as the flames approached his body, and then fell unconscious from smoke inhalation. Thus it was that he never saw the large chiropteran shadow of Democubus descending on hooked wings through the billowing smoke, never felt the hooked hands of his soulmate cradling him against his hooked chest, and never witnessed the passing galaxies as he was borne through the cosmos to the Moons of Dread. As Democubus and the Oneirophage flew off into space, the serpentine indentation of the Dreaming Predator on the flowerbed which he had thought would be his deathbed slowly kindled and then burst into flame, in an exact replica of his outline, and then Elasvai exploded, Dzandra burst into topaz supernova, and the garden planet was no more.
44
The sundered halves of the Tantradox floated within the Bloodbong. Hellfire arose from the interplanal portal on the floor, and blood began to boil, red steam filled the chamber, and roseate condensation bedewed the labyrinthine and mandalic network of twisted tubes and vessels, glass arteries and veins, that comprised the intricate flesh-smoking pipe. The Necrodelic, seated in the black lotus position with the mouthpiece of the Bloodbong betwixt his ebon lips, meditated with his crimson, glowing eyes wide open. He inhaled, and Junisia's skin began to crack and fissure, to blister and suppurate, the open wound left by the meathook in her impaled back dilating and leaking blood and vertebrae into the incandescent plasma. Chariah exhaled and blasted the skin from Drelrei, decorticating his cadaver with a gust of hot, violent, desert winds.
The skinless corpse of Drelrei floated with scarlet muscles, tissues, and membranes exposed, flayed of its entire integument by the simoom of the Necrodelic's breath. Chariah siphoned more necrodelia from the Bloodbong, smoking Junisia's eyes from their sockets and opening holes all over her body like a bloody honeycomb of flesh. She hovered before the transparent glass of the heart-chamber like some tormented mutation afflicted with hundreds of bodily orifices, each leaking, spurting, and spraying blood, pus, and gore. A caliginous pneuma blew the lips and tongue from Drelrei's mouth and the nose and eyelids from his face, as well as the black spaded scales from his head, back and tail, which drifted along the vermilion currents and sometimes shattered against the walls and floor of the pipe. The withdrawal of that pneuma scalped Junisia, ripping the black hair from her head by the roots with the skin of her face attached, lips, tongue, cheeks, nose, eyelids, and all. Her face quickly dissipated, leaving her scalplock to float like detritus upon the bubbling surface of boiling blood. Chariah breathed out once more, and the gaping wound in Drelrei's crotch where he had been castrated grew wider, slitting his torso to the sternum while two large flaps of muscle and tissue quivered like manta rays around the dripping laceration, revealing the gory cavern where his heart had once beat, now ringed by crimson stalactites of gore and severed arteries. The Necrodelic suckled, and the black nipples of Junisia were severed, followed by her entire breasts, ripped from her chest to explode with the sound of sizzling animal fat inside the Bloodbong. Beneath her ribs, the empty cavity left by her artescerated heart could now be seen, her empty, torn aorta gaping like a crimson vivisected serpent in the bloody void. Im
paling Drelrei with the force of his black air, Chariah further enlarged the gash in his torso and eviscerated the incubus, his intestines falling to the base of the pipe to wave about like vampiric anemones. The Necrodelic performed cunnilingus upon the mouthpiece of the Bloodbong, and Junisia's hundredfold labia shivered and fell off, one by one, like the petals of a flower blossom, the severed lobes of flesh scattering in the currents of vermilion ichor as though along gentle breezes. Her ten clitorises were severed, and then her vagina was torn into a giant stigmata from her thighs to her gullet, vivisecting the succubus so that all her internal organs from her womb in a steady cortege, a grotesque parody of childbirth. Chariah ejaculated a jetstream of black smoke from his mouth, blowing all the organs from Drelrei as well, to spin and ricochet around the blood-filled heart chamber in little whirlpools as they joined the spilled innards of their mate. Dark inspiration decapitated Junisia, and dark expiration did the same to her former Siamese twin, their severed heads floating and sinking and then rising up through the currents again. Chariah breathed twice, and both tails were ripped from broken spines, the club of Junisia's ankylosaurus tail and the mace of Drelrei's stegosaurus tail floating like mortally wounded sea serpents in the broiling plasma. Two more breaths ripped all the remaining tissue from their skeletons, and then those skeletons themselves began to blacken and unhinge and clatter to the golgotha of the pipe-chamber's floor. Chariah then smoked each one of their internal organs and every single bone of their skeletons individually, one by one, in slow succession, inhaling to disintegrate those of Junisia and exhaling to explode those of Drelrei. He saved their severed heads for last, slowly smoking their skulls and the brains still encased therein for over an hour.