by Dave Brockie
The list of my atrocities had taken hours to read but my unit held iron discipline throughout the entire process. They knew full well that they would be rewarded with seven nights of debauchery in appreciation of the patience they now exhibited. The streets would flow red with wine and blood as the warrior classes hurled themselves upon the city in a frenzied orgy of humping and drunken lunacy. During this time no one could deny any warrior’s request and as a result families had been smuggling their wives, daughters, and pets out of the city for days.
Ur the Intoner, a multi-tentacled bulb of flesh who rose through the floor as the only visible part of a much larger creature, finally reaches the end of the list. Not a snicker had risen from my men, even as the details of the frozen midget episode were revealed. For my part, I had been hanging by my balls for over three hours.
“Let these deeds be recorded as most foul, and through his love of the murk, let this being attain new status. Let his scrotum be released, and let him assume his command, or speak your grievance against him now, knowing that false words will feed the gibbering hounds of hell.”
“I will speak!” comes a booming voice with which I am all too familiar.
Necrosov, clad in the raiment of a Tolgar (the same rank that I occupied and sought to elevate myself from), strides forward with unbridled aggression towards the Throne of Swords, which our leader is impaled upon, within “The Symbol.” All of my rank have the right to impede my progress through trial by arms if they felt that they could defeat me in individual combat. Necrosov, who is not called Necrosov but goes by the name of Cromis, feels he has that skill and therefore that right.
The illusion of our battle is so complete that I have lost all memory of my later life. Each conflict generated by the mind of the LoiGoi is so perfect in every detail that I believe in them utterly, as does my rival.
Kneeling before the great throne, Cromis presents his case to our hollow lord (such it is said about our master who never appears anywhere without his fully encasing plate armor). Vamier hears his plea. Cromis is strong. Cromis is loyal. Cromis is a rampant butt-pirate. Cromis will kill me and gain my power, and in doing so the Master will enjoy an even more powerful servant than if the two of us walked the same earth. And the master, bound by rituals even stronger than he is, must agree. And so our battle continues.
We are stripped naked and placed upon a great lead disc, suspended by huge steel chains above a pit of flaming coal. We are each handed a cruel knife with which to gut each other with. With a blare of trumpets and a cheer of approval, we attack.
My opponent is cagey. He has waited and planned for this usurpation for years, waiting for me to come to this plateau of my development in order to intervene when I was at my weakest, blood streaming from my loins, my scrotum pierced and mangled. So I indulge him in his plan, feigning exhaustion and making no offensive moves. Letting him think that it’s working thus far, I slowly draw him in as we circle about on the disc, which is growing increasingly more hot and uncomfortable. Ordinarily I would increase the density of the soles of my feet, but in this earlier form of myself I cannot attain the state of transmutation.
I don’t watch his eyes, but always his blade. His eyes cannot kill me but his knife can, and I wait for his rush with the patience of the hunter, sensing that the ambush I planned was unsuspected. But suddenly I become the victim.
He throws his knife in a curved and quick motion that he has practiced for years. A quick and little movement yet propelled with an amazing amount of force. It is done at eye-level, so for the barest fraction of an instant the knife appears to be in the same place even though it is drawing closer to me. When I realize his stratagem, it is too late. But even then I have not grasped the fullness of his plan. The knife covers the space between us in a flickering instance. All I can do is twist my body so the knife imbeds itself in my shoulder rather than my throat. But why would he throw away his weapon? The answer is immediately obvious as he bulls into me, attempting to drive me off the edge of the disc into the fire beyond. My weapon arm is paralyzed from making a downwards thrust into his back by the wound he has inflicted upon me. I have but one chance. I let myself be pushed back at great speed towards the edge of the disc, but at the same time lock my good hand deeply into the tangle of dark hair that sits atop his head. As we pass the edge I thrust my knife sideways, the only range of motion that my arm will allow. I wedge it into the middle one of the links of the great chains that suspend our arena. Too late he realizes he is caught. As we go over the edge, my body pivots around the knife’s sketchy purchase within the link—Cromis, propelled by my strenuous pulling of his hair, goes right over.
But this split second of violence is not yet over. As he falls he claws madly at my body, seeking any sort of hold which could save him from his fiery fate. His nails rake my stomach and loins, and finally lock around my penis in an iron grip. The force of his motion travels up my aching shaft, through my body, and to the knife in the chain, which is our only link to the safety that the burning disc offers.
Which is stronger, my cock or my blade?
The knife snaps, and we both tumble into the abyss.
We land on the dusty slopes of a rock-strewn landscape, thickly blanketed with pine trees. Around us a great battle rages between the armored legionnaires of the Romans and fur-clad barbarians. But I have little time to observe the details of our latest trial as Necrosov launches himself upon me in another series of slashing attacks with his weapon, a long-bladed spear. I defend myself with my glaive, parrying his mad thrusts while attempting to find an opening and spill his guts in a definitive manner. All around us struggling knots of men slay each other with utmost savagery. Here, in the Teutonburg Forest, the expansion of the Roman Empire will be halted, at least for the time being. Every member of my legion will be slain. But it matters not, for these men are already dead. Their loss has decorated the pages of history books for centuries. But I have a far more personal struggle at hand as I beat back a series of slashing, stabbing thrusts to my midsection. Three times I knock my attacker’s spear aside, all the while seeking an opening to reverse the attack. Necrosov, or whatever name he goes by in this time, grunting and sweating, presses his assault. His fourth thrust comes under my glaive at a difficult angle and jabs through the lower part of my breastplate, penetrating through my leather undershirt and into my abdomen. The pain is immediate and intense, shocking in its newness—a pain I have never really felt before. Gasping, I reel away, the spear lodged firmly in my pierced armor, wrenching it out of my adversary’s grasp as he loses his footing in the loose soil. A wild-eyed tribesman rears up in my path as I seek to understand what has happened to me. My weapon lashes out and cleaves his face in twain, spattering the pine needle carpet with the droplets of his being. And no power is transferred into me to heal my wound.
Panic grips me for a moment as I realize that the rules have changed. As the LoiGoi sends us whirling through time, the parameters change with each confrontation. Now fully cognizant of my future lives and the implications of this battle, I have been stripped of my necrotic abilities of soul-sucking and transmosis. I am essentially only a powerful human, and I can only hope that the same rules apply to my rival, who has grabbed a sword from a dead man’s hand and pursues me up the slope. All around us shrieking men lock in their death-throes, as I painfully pull the spear from my side and send it whizzing by Necrosov’s head. The wound is not deep but it is bleeding profusely—I can feel the hot liquid streaming down my thighs. But I stand my ground and meet his charge with vigor, blocking a series of cleaving blows that ring like the anvil of Pluto off our shivering swords. Here, in an age not our own, in a fight not of our design, in a body alien and unforgiving, I have never felt so alive. Exulting in my pseudo-humanity I block, hack, slash, and parry, seeking any opening in my opponent’s guard. But he gives me none. We stand, locked in the web of weaving steel, each blow shivering through our bodies and into the bloody ground below. Neither one of us will give a step or
even an inch. Gradually the outlines of the battlefield begin to melt away around us, the struggles and screams of the victors and the vanquished begin to fade. They are slowly replaced by an infinite blue void, studded with stars, and the great roaring shout of a deep-throated god. We float in this space and rain blows upon each other, slipping through time in an endless profusion of costumes and battlefields. With each blow, our situation changes. I am of the Mongol horde—he is a warrior of the Eastern Marches, then a Viking, then a renegade monk bent on despoiling the Vatican. I am Alaric the Visigoth, he is Valens the Vanquished, burning in a barn as his martial dreams turn upon him. Cucullan and Mushasi. We follow Charlemagne and Pepin, Salidan and Philip. We slay in the name of Jesus and Satan, Mohammed and many other gods and men with names forgotten by time’s sad march. Our guises fall from us like rain, only to be replaced by another, and another, and another. Somewhere throughout this struggle, I wound him in his shoulder with a battle-ax. The weapons are changing as well as we march towards the present through the decades of carnage that our master has visited upon this planet. We fight with clubs, then spears, then swords, then guns, then nuclear bombs. Millions are consumed by the legacy we bring and leave behind, and still we hammer each other and the planet beneath us to the edge of futility. Only my opponent’s contorted face and hacking arm remain constant as we fight through time, each blow sending showers of plasmic froth from our boiling bodies. Locked in the death struggle, we vaguely notice that we have become one being.
But such things cannot last. Our maker has enjoyed the show, his tour through the endless wars of his making that have led us to the brink of the apocalypse. He has enjoyed watching his two favorite puppies fight against the backdrop of endless hatred. But the final act beckons, and the action that precedes the final act is Necrosov burying his ax in my skull, splitting my upper palette and imbedding it in my lower jaw. At this, time’s whirl stops, and I stumble backwards, droplets spraying from the obscenity that was my head. My motion tears the weapon from his grasp, but he is too canny a foe to give me any respite. My senses reel. It’s too late. My fingers claw at the shaft of the weapon, trying to drag it from my skull and strike back at my foe. But it’s no good. I sink to my knees in a pathetic heap, my eyes trying to form a single vision. Necrosov looms above, steaming and carnal, joints glistening, eye gleaming with a hellish light as he exults in his victory. He is the chosen one. Now the gates of the underworld will open, and the armies of the flesh-sculptor’s making will savage the earth, ultimately consuming themselves in the furnace from which they issued. And Necrosov shall lead them, glutted on my strength, invincible in his own. I have failed.
He moves his mouth to the wound, holding the sides of my split skull in each hand. He opens my head like a clam and bends to slake his lust on all that my life has been. All I can do is weep.
Suddenly, there is an explosion of motion and force, a muscled mass that leaps over my back and collides with my rival even as he stands at the altar of his destiny. He is denied, and he falls back with a muffled curse, seeking to extricate the 160-pound combo of fang and claw from his face.
Maug has somehow followed me through the sunless depths of the underearth, wiggling through the wretched walls of filth to fight at my side one final time. Necrosov stumbles and falls heavily, Maug tearing a scarlet ruin through his facial flesh. I realize I have a chance, and I wonder if my Father gave it to me.
I rip the ax out of my head and lurch forward, massing my strength. I can’t see my target—I can only sense him struggling ahead of me, bellowing curses, unaware of my approach. Maug’s war cry abruptly becomes a shriek of pain as I bring the ax down in a crimson arc that lands full force on the neck of my adversary, severing skin, muscle, steel and bone as his head leaps off his body in a geyser of blood and corruptive juices. I grab him by the shoulders and lift him into the air, emptying his body into the maw of my split skull, which sprouts teeth from the edges. Drinking of his life, I feel his pain. He has suffered so long, just as I have. He has been used, as I have. And he also has sought relief from his pain in the most abominable of ways. But in the end, perhaps he knew that his strength, added to mine, would help me achieve my mission. And maybe in this he found a measure of peace.
As has Maug. Panting heavily, he lies on his side, guts bulging from where my blow has torn him open. As my skull knits together, my vision clears through the red-rimmed haze; I behold the death-throes of my lovely friend, here, in this nighted vault far beneath the surface of a world gone mad. The chamber breathes and expands, revealing its true depth, and the gently glowing, rippling rings of flesh or fat that surround me for miles, packed to bursting with the malignant creatures observant of the ritual.
Maug dies with a final shuddering gasp, and his energy passes into me, as it had with Kepler, and Gabby, and Cheng-Tzu, and anybody else that had ever been close to me. But I smile, as I see the final shadow fade from his eyes. The sacrifice they have given me is the humanity I have tasted, and this has given me the will to pursue what I have searched and striven for, ever since I first dreamt it could be a reality—the chance to destroy the destroyer, to commit demonic patricide, and rid the world of the curse of war.
To kill the arch-devil that unseen tongues named the LoiGoi, Corpse-Lord of the Hollow Earth, seducer of the humans into the role that had been set for them—that of food . . .
Here comes Daddy.
And when he comes to me he chooses a shape that is simple for me to understand, not the roiling and flabbergasted mass of pulpifying flesh that is one of his true guises. When my Father comes to me, to set me in command of that infernal legion which is arranged around me in the endless chamber, he comes to me in a way that will both soothe and tempt me at the same time. He comes to me as a woman.
It is Nurse Faber, the nurse that I raped and murdered in Russia, the one the Obersturmbannführer said that one day I would be allowed to mate with again. No, wait. I am, no, I was, the Obersturmbannführer. But as she glides closer to me in a serpentine manner which goes far beyond the natural grace of a woman, her outlines begin to flutter and fade. She is Gabby, and then she is my mother from the steppes of Russia. She is the charming Jewess I murdered in the sewers of Warsaw. She is all women, and then none. Finally she is a he, an it, a forty-foot tall insect-like being, clad in intricate plates of overlapping armor that give him the appearance not unlike (yet not like) that of a huge deep-sea fish. Its eyes are white and soulless, lolling in their sockets as they grasp at truth with no meaning. Numerous mandibles and cleaver-like appendages jut from his body at all angles, and a curious stalk of gristly flesh rises from between his eyes, ending in a another eye which weeps a stream of viscous pus. Chittering in an alien tongue, his hide cracks and splits and lets forth with waves of excretions and gasses which bubble up and coalesce into new life, which spring away into the darkness to pursue their hidden tasks. And as he gibbers and shakes above me, I sense that this is the center of his true form.
His body is immense beyond belief, his feed-stalks traversing the tunnels of the hive-world known as Earth, running to every battlefield, every mass-murder, every Joy-Division and death-camp. His body provides the living quarters for legions of his servants who are busy creating the apocalypse army I was apparently destined to lead. I have despaired on how to kill such a creature. Where do you start?
You have to start at the center, and judging by the ecstatic power-rush which I am garnering from his being, that is where I stand. Just beholding him is the most intense of sensations, and my skin crawls with delight. I am next to the greatest depository of brain-juice on the entire planet. There is enough of it to power everything that he has created, and I notice the slimed stalks and tentacles which come off of him and disappear into the floor. He has to control this immense being from somewhere, and it is done from here, his brain. I have been traveling inside of the LoiGoi for some time, and now I have reached the final chamber.
“My Liege,” I say with phony reverence, bowing be
fore him, yet knowing in my heart that even at this moment, nay, especially at this moment, that I ran the risk of turning to his side.
Bulging, he looms above me, glaring down with remorseless will. His first words are not understandable in any conventional communicative sense. When he opens his mouth I am assailed by a wave of palatable force and corruption, a surging vortex of depthless hunger. His is an implacable will, his breath like the ice from the tomb of a god. The maw grows larger, and with a vigorous wave of stench I feel myself becoming engulfed in his horny and slimed tongue, sucked asunder. He wraps me in an obscene embrace that I gratefully repel into. Suffused with the power needed to fully recover from my battle, the joy of my Father’s love heals me. I am his chosen child, and so many have died to bring me here. He is proud of me, and he shows his love by taking me into his mouth.
“Daddy, oh Daddy, take me into your womb. Let me make it your tomb.”
Now is the time for my betrayal. In his necrotic embrace I find my opening. In the strength he gives me I find the strength to attack him. I extend my arms upwards, fusing them together into one stabbing mass which I drive into the roof of his mouth, which splits with a hideous rending crunch, vomitous ichor cascading all over me. Still I drive my murder-pole into his being, piercing his vile braincase and penetrating into its depths. As I reach the core of his being, I explode the shaft outwards into many corkscrewing shafts, ripping into the vaults of his mind and doing as much damage as possible, seeking the feeding juice that will give me the power to destroy him.