by Brant Danay
Outside the mutating castle, the stars and planets glittered like jewels, and galaxies stretched across the pure black of space like runes and hieroglyphics written upon the cosmos itself. Mandalic nebulae gleamed in hypnotic, enlightening, colorful patterns through the diaphanous windows. The Oneirophage gazed upon all this through the various skylights of Phantasmagorika, seeing for the first time with physical eyes the expanses of the universe he had dreamt of and astrally projected through for millennia.
He refilled his prism goblet with more of the intoxicating wine that he had brewed from blood and spider venom, and slowly sipped from its rainbow rim while he stargazed. He was so close to becoming the Jh'a'vyraa that he could feel in his blood, coursing through his veins like the sweet, poisonous wine he imbibed. With every dream and every death, the Jh'a'vyraa grew nearer, so near that the Oneirophage felt he could reach out and tattoo his body with moksha, drink nirvana through the Umbilicus, and make love to the end of time itself.
17
Chariah meditated while smoking a thousand spiders at once. True to her word, Spidratha had bestowed ten hecatombs of her arachnid devotees upon the Necrodelic, leaving them in a single giant net of spiderweb within his bestial spaceship. Chariah had emptied the entire chiliad into the dungeon above his meditation chamber, then descended the staircases to the level below, entered his private lair, and released its contents into the Bloodbong. The various arachnids frantically swam and thrashed around, climbing over one another, trying to scale the walls inside and leaving pieces of their flesh stuck to the heated glass. The spider millitomb was a combination of the different arachnid warrior species Chariah had witnessed in the Spider-Serpent Wars upon Grystiawa. Tarantulas, black widows, violin spiders, recluse spiders, trap-door spiders, funnel-web spiders, Spidaurs, Sentinels, and Black Widow Amazons all floated within the giant heart of the Bloodbong.
Chariah assumed the black lotus position and parted his black lips. The mouthpiece of his elaborate pipe obediently inserted itself between his fangs, and the Necrodelic began to smoke spiderflesh. He watched with slowly increasing levels of hypnosis as the arachnids treaded blood with their eightfold, desperately scurrying legs. Many drowned in the depths of boiling plasma, trapped beneath their brethren. Spider legs were being amputated by the hundreds, ripped from their sockets by the powerful inhalations of the Necrodelic. Many of them floated into the labyrinthine tubes of the Bloodbong, making their way into smaller bubbling chambers or towering demonic totem poles and getting stuck in narrow corridors and shafts, where they slowly disintegrated. Hourglasses were scorched black between the breasts of the Black Widow Amazons, stripping them of their elite rank and battle-prowess.
For over an hour, the Necrodelic smoked the ten hecatombs of spiderflesh, drifting deeper and deeper into a psychedelic trance. He meditated upon the nature of spiders, gaining several of their powers as he ingested their very essence. He reveled in the euphoric effects of betrayal, the intoxicating new evil which he had discovered that day, whose effects now saturated his floating heart with a surge of black adrenaline, until it felt as though his heart had flown free of his chest and immersed itself within the inky waters of the river Styx, to be further demonized by the inherent evils within those cursed currents. His soul had been stained with newfound sins, and had grown darker and heavier than ever before, collapsing in upon itself like a black hole. Rushes of pure power shot through his shuddering flesh as he grew more and more drugged by the psychedelic stimulants of betrayal. Blood-soaked reveries of the Grystiawan aceldama played themselves over and over in his mind, like the music of a never-ending song. Vivid flashbacks of the apocalyptic battle assailed all five of his physical senses at once, as well as wreaking hallucinatory havoc upon his powers of echolocation and other psychic and esoteric modes of perception, then weaving them all together in strange and mind-blowing synesthesias. As the final burnt pieces and organs of the sacrificial arachnids swirled in crimson whirlpools, sinking and rising on red exploding bubbles, Chariah found himself detaching from his flesh and descending into the astral plane upon his silver cord, like a spider lowering itself on a single rope of webbing.
Mother Chaos embraced her dangling demon lover, kissing him while the souls of dead spiders fell around them like rain.
"The Oneirophage lives, my mistress," said the Necrodelic. "I have seen it in my visions, sensed it as I smoked the spiderflesh."
"...yes, my love...it was always destined to be so...you two shall meet again...in proximal futures...adjacent destinies...he is your soulmate, my child...a dark soulmate...but a soulmate nonetheless...your fates are intertwined...your paths run parallel and form many helices...but for now, you must focus on something else...come with me, my child...I have much to show you..."
Mother Chaos' vagina tightened like an iris around the pupil of her womb, allowing Chariah to look upon her inner oracles and gaze upon the universe. A crimson eyeball grew in the tip of his penis. He saw the Oneirophage, stalking the soul of Spidratha far below them, near the bottom of the universe. He watched as the Oneirophage defeated her astrosome in blood combat and stole her red hourglass marking. He made telepathic contact with the burnt and shattered spirit of Spidratha as she was falling to Hell in pieces, each amputated limb and dislodged organ descending upon its own silver strand, like a mobile of severed body parts. Her torso bore an open hourglass-shaped wound, as if the crimson sigil had been surgically removed. It left her entrails, organs, egg sac, and spinnerets exposed, and she was soon spilling her innards into space. Her battered head bounced loosely upon a broken neck, then severed itself to descend to Hell upon a silver cord which had burrowed itself into her brain. Her decapitated head returned the Necrodelic's psychic contact then, telepathically hissing at him as it plummeted through the astral plane, and vowing her vengeance just before it was engulfed by the raging fires of the underworld.
"Bastard betrayer...pray you become the Jh'a'vyraa...for if you do not, you will be my bitch in Hell...my bitch for all eternity..."
Chariah looked on stoically, his phallic eyeball blinking as it absorbed strange realities with its sorcerous gaze. As he thrust into Mother Chaos' oracle, opening many new worlds to his sexual vision, he asked, "Who is to be my next victim?"
Mother Chaos' oracular womb tightened around the Necrodelic's third eye phallus, revealing to him a green planet in a distant galaxy.
" ...you will seek out the Tantradox...upon the garden planet of Elasvai...the mission of genocide continues...megadeaths grow as fast and as furious as Hellfire...go now, my dark disciple...my incarnate prophecy...go, and show the Tantradox that you are the Messiah of Death..."
Chariah's eyeballed phallus came to orgasm in Mother Chaos' oracle, its single eyelid, like the eyelids of his face, fluttering with light speed rapid eye movement that revealed several psychic visions every nanosecond, flashing through his brain while he wept sperm, and then Mother Chaos' eye sockets became vaginas, and the Necrodelic's eyes became penises, making love to her skull and ejaculating black sperm and teardrops of darkest ink into her brain. The Dark Orgasm came and obliterated all else. The crimson eyeball on the Necrodelic's phallus slowly closed with sleep, and then Chariah was ascending the long strand of his silver cord like a spider, climbing upwards toward the physical plane, climbing upwards into his body, to set the Omnibeast on a direct course with the garden planet of Elasvai.
18
The Omnibeast's living dungeons crept through the prism palace of Phantasmagorika like sentient abysses, dripping from the ceilings like drops of liquid nothingness, absorbing entire chambers like black holes, forcing themselves like serpents of nullity through tunnels and corridors. Like the giant segmented tentacle of some chthonic beast, the dungeons wound and flowed and crawled and grew throughout the glimmering castle, haunting its hallways like a parasite, dragging its shadows behind it, a slow rapist, an expanding womb, a proactive prison seeking out its own captive. The pulsating dungeons conquered passage after passage, doorway af
ter doorway, filling the labyrinths like the river Styx, as if the Stygian floodgates in Hell had been opened to drown Phantasmagorika in atramentous deathwater. The dungeons quivered, the dungeons slithered, the dungeons stalked in utter silence, until they surrounded the donjon cockpit of the Oneirophage's newborn, pupating spaceship, the center of the prism palace, like gaping mouths that formed a hermetically sealed egg when they closed and gently possessed the slumbering life form inside.
Adamantium bars lowered like a hexagonal portcullis and the iron clang of gateways shutting resonated through the chamber, trapping the Oneirophage like an animal in a cage. With the Oneirophage sleeping in the six-sided prison cell like a slumbering embryo in a succubus' womb, the living dungeons withdrew to the belly of the Omnibeast with their prey in tow, slipping back through the mazes as though on a tether of intestine or umbilical cord, pulled and tugged by unseen forces to some higher surface beyond.
*
The Oneirophage lay imprisoned in the Necrodelic's dungeons, having been mysteriously captured by the sorceries of his demonic enemy, the strange machinations of the living Omnibeast, or the dual powers of necromancer and bestial spaceship combined. At first believing himself in the throes of nightmare, the Oneirophage gradually awakened from his slumber, consciousness slowly creeping like maggots back into his flesh, then coming alive with flies of pain. His wounds were still fresh and bleeding; he could smell them in the fetid air as he awoke. The living black widow of his left hand was crawling back and forth in a panic, nearly dislocating his shoulder as it dragged his limp arm behind it. Surrounded by pitch-black, absolute darkness, the Oneirophage relied upon his sense of touch and his viper's pits to synthesize reality. He tested the black cell with cautious fingers, exploring the hot pulpy interior of flesh criss-crossed with unforgiving adamantium bars, like some behemoth sex slave in armored lingerie, skin and sinew bulging from beneath their iron restraints. It was as though he had been locked in a cage which had then been swallowed or enwombed by some giant black demon. There seemed to be no entrance or exit in the fleshy walls, just a continuous hexagonal portcullis that also covered the ceiling and floor. He would have to make his own door.
With one long-nailed finger the Oneirophage drew the Umbilicus from its sheath of flesh in his forearm, releasing a trickle of blood as he pulled it from the slit of skin and grasped it with his fist. Fumbling through the dark, the Oneirophage carne to a pulsing wall and began to suck at the visceral substance through his sorcerous straw. The wall shivered and dripped blood from its wound onto the iron bars below. The Oneirophage suckled and drank and chewed and devoured an entire square of flesh from iron boundary to iron boundary, opening a bleeding window into the spaceship interior and peering down the crimson and black hallways of the Omnibeast's dungeons. The adamantium remained undaunted by the straw, nor was it affected by the physical blows of the Oneirophage, forcing the serpent to redirect his attention upon the living organic tissue of the walls behind the iron mesh, cannibalizing the bestial spaceship from within, drinking its blood, feasting upon its flesh, and drugging himself with its dreams.
The taste of the Necrodelic's spaceship was like candy death, candy made from corpses' organs, freshly excised and coated with sugar and drugs, or embalmed with wine-soaked bandages and fermented for centuries in perfumed canopic jars. The gustatory sensations invigorated the Oneirophage. As he sucked his escape route through the visceral walls, he also sucked forth the dreams of the bestial spaceship's bowels, dreams of Satanic sodomy and erotic evisceration. The spaceship itself seemed to respond to the strange visions with gentle shudders, but the Oneirophage could not be sure if this was just a product of his dream-drugged mind.
His blood began to coagulate as he invigorated himself with raw meat and stolen dreams, his wounds knitting themselves back together, his strength returning to his muscles and mind. When he had regained his power, he hissed and sprayed a thick mist of green, acidic venom which dissolved the adamantium bars. The cage melted and warped until it was malleable enough to resculpt and climb through. The black flesh around it dissolved wherever the serpent venom dripped, recoiling into nothingness with only a wisp of oily steam to mark its passing. The Oneirophage slithered through the escape route his serpentine powers had opened and into a red corridor leading through the dungeons and guts of the spaceship. Below his crawling belly, as his ridged scales wriggled along the organic floor, his engorged consciousness sensed the passage of the cosmos at speeds faster than thought. He could feel the flight of the Omnibeast in his ophidian glands as well, the interstellar winds of space travel throbbing in the pits above his fangs. The Necrodelic no doubt traveled through the universe to do further battle in his quest to become the Jh'a'vyraa.
Tapping into the nervous system of the Omnibeast with the Umbilicus and overriding its reflexes, the Oneirophage commanded several of the dungeon cells to open themselves. As the valvelike passages irised and gaped, the Oneirophage abducted the Necrodelic's prisoners. He greedily drank their dreams, leaving their lifeless husks and hollow skulls behind in the womblike cages, then absorbed several others with his Darkprism, to devour and ravish later. The rest he bound in shackles torn from the dungeon walls. The excised shackles left bloody holes behind, like those left by amputated limbs or castrated genitalia. The Oneirophage forced the chained prisoners along in a single line, driving them through the maze of the bestial spaceship.
With revenge on his forked tongue, Hell in his dilated eyes, and dreams of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa spinning in his head, the Oneirophage hunted for the Necrodelic. The Dreaming Predator cared not where the pathways led. He slithered through round corridors and began exploring the Necrodelic's lair, observing his demonium and his possessions so that he would know better how to annihilate him.
The living walls radiated a natural black phosphorescence, a raven bioluminescence which provided light inside the spaceship. Umbilical cords were ubiquitous and served a myriad of purposes. Several levels of dungeons and oubliettes, sometimes bi-level and sometimes tri-level, took up much of the lower spaceship, with little more than chains and shackles in the cells and nothing without. Below them were sentient sewage systems, with both mechanical and living organs. Beyond the dungeons were empty, high-ceilinged chambers with black ribcages supporting their lofty domes. Gothic architecture adorned doorways, gates, and portcullises that led to unfurnished, unused, and uninhabited womb-chambers. Stairways of black bone, sometimes with entire skeletons built into a single step, with skulls for finials and ribcage balustrades, were ubiquitous, leading and spiraling to hundreds of different destinations. There were locked doors leading only to balconies, and labyrinths that seemed to exist merely for their own sake. Empty alcoves. A single weapons gallery. No windows, no bedchambers, no food, and no other inhabitants besides the prisoners confined in the dungeons. The Necrodelic was an ascetic, an anchorite, a minimalist, a demon concerned only with the smoking of flesh, the destruction of the universe, and his own evil enlightenment. He required neither food, drink, air, nor sleep. He cared not for possessions. His was an existence of black austerities and lethal meditations, of necromancy, genocide, and raw malevolence, his every energy focused upon becoming the Messiah of Death.
*
Chariah followed a trail of dreams through his vessel, a path of rainbow bits writhing on the floor like tapeworms freshly exposed to light, the spoor of the escaped Oneirophage. Through dungeons where captives were shackled and imprisoned, through oubliettes where they writhed on torture racks and crucifixes, and through abattoirs where they were stored like food, the Necrodelic stormed like an enraged reaper. Down blackboned stairways and lifts made of giant, horned skulls, through circular corridors like veins and arteries and vertical shafts like throats and vaginas, Chariah trailed the dream-eater.
A puddle of blood and rainbow dreams marked one of the Oneirophage's communions. Chariah traveled on in the direction it led. Ahead, he heard drippings and smelled fresh death. Looking upwards, he discovered
the four limbs of a victim, suspended from the ceiling like a hanging jungle, leaking crimson onto the floor beneath.
Chariah tore down the severed limbs, gathered them up, and then inserted them into a mouth farther down the hallway, which swallowed them whole and then sent them on their way through the ship's intricate systems of inner digestive labyrinths, to be deposited in their proper repository. Questing along, several more hanging jungles of arms and legs awaited. Occasionally a dream-dried husk littered the floor beneath the drizzling limbs.
The Necrodelic tore a womb from the ceiling and began filling the sac with the organic detritus, dragging it through the corridors by an umbilical cord. Chariah emptied the bulging womb and fed the severed body parts to the various mouths and vaginas of the ship whenever possible, to be borne through the esophagi, wombs, valves, veins and arteries of the Omnibeast to the flesh reservoirs above the Necrodelic's meditation chamber.
At the centerpoint of the dungeons was a foyer, with corridors leading off in eight different directions, and two large, twin staircases. Limbs dangled in every archway and from every lip and labia-like balcony. Like windchimes of flesh they swayed in the air, making soft death-music as they collided and bled. The Oneirophage had deliberately left trails in all directions to confuse the Necrodelic. Cursing, Chariah bashed the womb he was holding by the umbilical cord into the wall, scattering arms, legs, limbed bodies, blood, and organs all throughout the foyer in an explosion of gore, and leaving behind a purpling bruise upon the stricken flesh of the shuddering foyer.
