Demonmachy: Demonic Apocalypse (Messiah of Death)

by Brant Danay

  The Oneirophage slipped further into enlightenment, his multicolored astrosome slipping free of his corporeal form. The Oneirophage's astral body floated to the blown-out window, gazing out at the universe floating by. He himself had no knowledge of where it was Phantasmagorika went at sunset. Gazing through the new window, he began to understand. Phantasmagorika was spinning through outer space. It didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, just drifting and floating, much like its master did in his dream states at night. The Oneirophage looked out upon galaxies flowing by, stars revolving, planets in orbit, moons tilting.

  Later that night, the Oneirophage found himself back in bed. He had just awoken, but he wasn't sure if he was still dreaming or not. He gazed at the black square of cosmos which was now his bedroom wall. Starlight and nebulae, comets and black holes, samsaric cycles and apocalypses, the Oneirophage watched all with drugged fascination, the contrast of the light and the dark, the hypnotic movement of celestial objects, the mesmerizing patterns that were formed and then destroyed.

  One of the black holes was coming closer now, flying toward his window. The Oneirophage wondered if he had fallen into its event horizon in his nocturnal journey, and if it was actually he and his palace which were flying towards it. The black hole grew larger and larger, like the shadow of Satan looming over the universe. As it got closer the Oneirophage could see that the black hole had wings. Hooked wings. And hooked horns, hooked shoulders, and a hooked phallus, as well.

  It was not a black hole, but a soulmate: the fear-raping, nightmare-ingesting, phobiphiliac Democubus. The large, ebon gargoyle demon flew in through the blasted window, his sharp hooks silhouetted against the light of distant galaxies behind him. He had hooks over his eyes, hooked fangs, and hooks on his elbows and knees. His fingers were miniature scythes, turned toward each other's tips like pincers. His toes were hooked with gripping claws. He had hooks on his ankles, hooks on his genitals, hooks on his chest. Curved hooks arose from each shoulder like battle armor, and from his skull like the horns of a helmet.

  Democubus landed amidst the debris of body parts and began to unscrew the top of a decapitated head with his hooked fingers. He twisted the piece of scalp and skull off with his thumb and forefinger, then plunged his hooked phalanges into the brains inside. When he withdrew them, they trailed long squirming organisms that looked like black tapeworms. With a grunt, Democubus devoured them. The spiked demon savored the taste of fear and phobia as he swallowed, sighing as its dark ambrosia wriggled sensuously down his throat.

  Democubus floated across the room and crouched over the limbless and gorily perforated body of a pink and blue succubus who had barely survived the tortures of the Oneirophage and now lay, breathing shallowly, upon the floor where the dream-eater had discarded her. Democubus crouched down upon her and began to satiate his sexual appetites with her wriggling husk. He drove his barbed penis repeatedly into her vagina while she screamed, pumping her womb and brain full of horrific nightmares and pulling out entrails and black tapeworms of fear as they copulated. After he had withdrawn himself from her flesh, the dark parasitic strings, the black tapeworms of fear, remained dangling from his genitals and pubic hooks. The succubus continued to scream, her limbless torso writhing and bouncing around the floor until she finally perished with one last shriek of terror. Democubus floated over to the side of the Oneirophage, who had watched him rape the succubus with mesmerized, dream-drugged fascination.

  "Nightmares have a force all their own," spake the gargoyle. "Tis their eros and thanatos which is both source and fuel of my psychomancy. You would be wise to include them in your indulgences, and incorporate them into your ritual dream-cycles."

  The gargoyle spoke articulately and eloquently. His voice was a raspy baritone and had to be dragged like a symbiote from his mouth, for he spoke with a hooked tongue, and his throat, larynx, and lungs were all adorned with hooks, as well. Despite its rasp, it was deep and booming. It often reverberated, but never echoed.

  "My phagia doth flow often enough with nightmares and wet dreams," the Oneirophage replied.

  "Only indirectly."

  Democubus floated to the severed head which he had opened earlier and lifted it from the floor. He reached inside the brain once again, and with another display of psychomancy withdrew more of the black wormlike nightmares, as well as a writhing mass of white counterparts. "Tis these, Oneirophage" he said, "Which are the stuff of death. Devour them raw, and thou shalt know the secrets of existence."

  Democubus raised the worming fistful of black nightmares and white wet dreams to his mouth and devoured it.

  "Tis dreams which are the stuff of death," the Oneirophage replied. "The raw materials of power which build one's tolerance for change, that make one immune to every possibility, potentiality, and eventuality. To conquer dreams is to conquer reality. Ultimately, reality and the universe are one and the same."

  "In nightmares dwell both fear and lust, and tis these which inevitably lead a soul to its doom. To ingest phobias and philias is to strengthen oneself and obtain evolution. To expel philias and phobias is to cleanse oneself and attain enlightenment. Master this polarity, and you master your soul."

  "In dreams I find pain and desire, and tis these which make a corpse of flesh and a ghost of even the most powerful demon."

  "Pain is but a symptom of death, dream-eater, and not its causality."

  "I could say the same of fear."

  Democubus ruminated for a moment.

  "Do we fear death, or do we perish from our phobias?" Democubus pondered.

  "Do we hurt because we are dying, or is it our own pain which murders us?" the Oneirophage responded with equal zen.

  "I think perhaps this dark trinity is symbiotic", spake Democubus.

  "Fear, pain, and death", hissed the Oneirophage, "three sides of a dark pyramid, whose base and foundation is Hell."

  "And upon its zenith, the Jh'a'vyraa..." Democubus softly postulated.

  "I will seek to devour nightmares, then, while I imbibe dreams," the Oneirophage declared with a hiss.

  "And I shall seek to rape the wounded, the tortured, and the dying along with the fearful, the paranoid, and the phobic."

  Democubus began to creep back towards the cosmic window.

  "We shall speak of this again, Oneirophage," he promised, and then Democubus beat his large hooked wings and soared away into the cosmos, still trailing wet, black strands of fear from his crotch.

  The Oneirophage closed his eyes and began to suckle upon the Umbilicus again, this time drinking the nightmares from the hermaphrodite's skull. The tubes of the intricate straw bubbled with black fluid and squirming, wormlike substances as the Oneirophage drifted once again into drugged slumber, dreaming the nightmares of his victim, the nightmares of rape by a hermaphroditic Satan, of giving oneself venereal diseases, and of committing suicide while masturbating with a saw and dripping meathook.

  10

  Jackal-headed harpies gathered around the limp, unconscious body of the Necrodelic, their small breasts dangling and waving back and forth as they lapped up the shimmering, viscous synthesis of blood, drugs, and filth seeping through the corridor. Their long, brown hair became matted with the thick melange as the thirsty harpies dragged their tresses through the rancid oasis, their pointed lupine ears twitching, their sabretooth fangs gleaming in the shadows, their serpents' tongues flickering in and out while they drank.

  Vampire bats fluttered and flew into the corridor, while in the shadows of their wings sable leeches the size of hellhounds inched and crept forward. Both had been attracted by the scent of blood. Foul and stunted demons crawled forth from the innards of the sewers, tempted by the sight and smell of drugs. Giant larvae and black, anaconda-sized maggots squirmed from corners and cracks in the walls, drawn by the stench of offal and decay. The jackal-headed harpies, who were a rare breed of carnivore, vampire, and necrophage, had come for all three substances. The fiendish bitches were soon biting the heads off of bats
, swallowing large, wriggling larvae, tearing chunks of meat from the flanks of giant leeches and maggots, and drinking the blood of mutants.

  As the various bloodsuckers and scavengers gathered around the septic watering hole, the virulent brown lake being fed by the crimson rivers of Chariah's hemorrhaging wounds and the shimmering, multi-colored streamlets of psychedelic liquids dripping from his drenched body, the Necrodelic stirred from slumber, awakening from the unconsciousness that had befallen him upon escaping the mind-bending moat and the depths of his own twisted brain.

  Chariah's first perception was of a void in his sentience: he could not discern or comprehend time whatsoever, knew not if he'd been lying there for seconds or millennia after fainting. It was as though time had ceased to be, and, just as it was in the deepest stages of dreaming, there was neither future nor past, prophecy nor history, and no end or beginning to anything, including the universe and his own existence. The present was a black hole womb, trapping him in a dimension where time did not pass and keeping him blind and numb to its very concept, a helpless embryo never to be born, to be imprisoned eternally in the same infinite instant.

  It was the magic of Mother Chaos that rescued Chariah again. His soul trapped in the fetal position in a womb of nullity beyond time and space, her powers of entropy countered the inertia of his prison. Her spells of anarchy destroyed its oneness, its singularity. Mother Chaos brought change to the black hole womb, and thus time. Slowly, surgically, as though performing a womb transplant, the purple womb of Mother Chaos replaced the cold black hole womb of nullity. Inside her dark lavender sanctuary, the senseless Necrodelic found metamorphosis, evolution, and enlightenment. Time flowed again, and change had been reintroduced to the universe. The blindness lifted as Chariah observed the giant walls of Mother Chaos' purple vagina from the inside. Maternally, the Mistress of Entropy delivered her demonic devotee beyond the event horizon of her labia, and back into his corporeal body.

  Slowly reorienting himself as he gained awareness in small doses and pieced together the fractal memories in his mind like an interdimensional puzzle box, Chariah's nerves began coming to life like lit braziers, touched by torches aflame with the fires of Hell. The Necrodelic's black eyelids parted, and his glowing red eyes attacked the darkness and those who sought shelter or subterfuge within it. Chariah used his demonic sorcery to make eye contact with several of the scavengers at once, from all sides and every angle, from the bats hovering near the ceiling to the maggots, leeches and assorted larvae squirming on the floor, and the jackal-headed harpies and gnarled shrunken demons in-between, turning every creature that gazed into the Hellfire which roiled in the infernal sockets of his black skull to ebony ashes. The disintegrated corpses of the freshly immolated briefly held their shapes in the air, ephemeral sculptures of ash and smoke that collapsed an instant later, scattering throughout the corridor as though blown from a funeral pyre.

  Those that remained outside the scope of his vision were attacked instantaneously. The Necrodelic's claws slashed, and harpies splashed into the dark brown puddles in four pieces, their jackal heads still hissing as they rolled through the muck and down the hallways. Bats were skewered and spitted in mid-air by single claws, impaled, and then left to slide off the slick talons to die with twitching wings and ultrasonic death-cries on the floor below. The pale, twisted demons, gnarled and mutated from generations spent in the sewers of the Prism Palace, were disposed of with pyrokinetic fireballs. The giant black maggots, leeches and larvae were halved and then halved again, leaving them in bloody, quivering segments throughout the corridor.

  Empowered by murder, the Necrodelic healed his demon flesh and battered mind through the slayings. With every blow dealt he grew a little stronger; with every drop of blood he awakened a little further; with every death he became more powerful, until he had stolen all the life energy from the scavengers and bloodsuckers and left their ashes and mutilated corpses behind, in the murky crimson-brown pool of gore and offal which was now their polluted grave.

  Able to walk once again, Chariah made his way from the carnage through the sewers of Phantasmagorika. They were part of the same giant prism from which the rest of the palace had been carved. Cockroaches cast enormous shadows on the walls as they scuttled past, while the muck and filth along the floor created unhealthy looking rainbows in shades of umber throughout the passages. Chariah removed grilles and gridwork from the ceilings, tearing them from hinges or slashing them asunder, and climbed from level to level through the portals he created. Cisterns of old blood stank like ancient, used armor that had been worn by thousands of different demons, each dying during battle while wearing the rotten iron and bequeathing it, uncleansed and unwashed, to the next generation of warriors. Chariah circumnavigated a myriad of such cisterns as he wandered, some the size of small lakes, some filled with blood so senescent it was the color of rust. However, though much of the blood in the cisterns had been spilled several millennia ago, none of it had ever scabbed, coagulated, or evaporated. In fact, as Chariah made his way through the bowels of Phantasmagorika, it seemed that nothing within the prism palace ever dried.

  Puddles of gore were ubiquitous, and just as ancient as some of the blood cisterns, in the labyrinths of sewage. Some of them were waist-deep, forcing Chariah to wade through their depths as he crept through the maze. When he came to another blood cistern, he discovered a ladder constructed from the bodies of dead snakes. As he climbed the rungs of serpent corpses, nailed together at heads and tails, along the concave wall of the cistern, he observed the condensation of blood, bodily fluids, and waste materials mere inches from his face. The droplets and drippings upon the cylindrical walls cast blood rainbows across the chamber, rainbows that encompassed the entire spectrum of red, with seven arches of maroon, crimson, scarlet, vermilion, cerise, incarnadine, and carmine. As he reached the top, Chariah gazed down upon a dizzying array of kaleidoscopic reds, spurting through the air, criss-crossing one another and casting a ruby glow throughout the blood cistern.

  Chariah climbed into a narrow passage, making his way once more through twisting corridors and ancient puddles. Sanguinary condensation continued to pour from the walls like hemathidrosis. Weaving his way around corners for an hour, the Necrodelic found yet another shaft to deliver him unto a higher level of the palace's dungeons. The opening was a square in the prism of the ceiling, and just below it was a large puddle of blood with several eyeballs floating on its surface. The Necrodelic waded into the pool of blood, sending the eyeballs afloat on concentric ripples of crimson. He paused to look at the eyeballs.

  They were staring back at him.

  As Chariah started to dig his talons into the sheer walls of the shaft, the blood he was half-submerged in began to churn, forming itself into clawed arms that rose like waves from the surface to clutch at his flesh, dragging him back down the shaft with the piercing sounds of razors scraping across diamond. Mouths began to form upon the crimson surface, complete with fangs that tore at the Necrodelic's black flesh.

  The puddle of blood was alive.

  The living puddle tried to drown and dismember the Necrodelic simultaneously. Liquid tsunami claws raked his back. A red tentacle wrapped itself around his throat and began to strangle him. An underwater fist seized his testicles and attempted to crush them to a pulp. Mouths gibbered and gnashed. Eyeballs dilated and observed as they floated on the red tides of combat. Chariah slashed at the living pool of blood, splashing crimson across the walls and ceiling. Liquid limbs dissipated and fell like rain across the surface. Faces began to emerge from the depths as the elemental entity gained power, eyes and mouths aligning on the surface, complete with horned heads and scarlet hair.

  Chariah sliced the tentacles around his throat, then used his freed larynx and vocal cords to recite a spell of exorcism. The words came like a horde of bats from his mouth. A moment later, the ghosts which possessed the puddle were fished out like flukes by the Necrodelic's claws. The spirits writhed like maggots in the st
rong grip of his fists. Chariah raised his hands to his face and, with one necromantic breath, blew the ghosts down the corridor at light speed on the black winds of his lungs. The spirits dispersed like dust in a storm, the living puddle fell silent and still, faces and limbs melting with gentle splashes, mouths closing, eyeballs sinking to the bottom as though suddenly weighted down with iron. Chariah's sable breath blew the ghosts to Hell, where Satan received them with his sadomasochistic embrace.

  The living puddle died around the body of its exorcist. Chariah climbed through the blood-speckled shaft in the ceiling and continued his journey. He made his way up a few more levels, fighting off more possessed pools of blood as he did so. There were several more cisterns to negotiate as well. Cisterns of opium residue filled one level, along with the requisite opium-eaters that swam within it and populated their shores, whom Chariah promptly murdered. There were cisterns of ancient sperm and spent venom as well, to be crossed on catwalks above or tunnels below, or circumnavigated in the surrounding labyrinths. Finally, he came to the upper levels, where solid wastes and garbage were accumulated. The main chamber was a vast, open repository filled with towering heaps of garbage and landfills full of body parts and internal organs. Mounds of severed limbs filled the room like mountain ranges. The gleaming white femurs and humeruses of those who had recently been picked clean intermingled with the brown and brittle bones of eons past. Still enfleshed arms and legs abounded, in various stages of decay. From the gangrenous to the maggot-infested to the still-warm, the chamber was like a vision of drug-induced thanatopsis.

  The gruesome heaps of body parts buzzed with millions of flies, crawled with maggots and nightworms, and were frequently partaken of by the hungry denizens of Phantasmagorika's sewers, which were present upon this level in abundance, including the jackal-headed harpies and their hyena-faced cousins, the starving mutant demons with translucent skin and their bloated, bony, sickly children, and the large fungus beasts which moved slowly amongst the refuse.