by Brant Danay
Gathering a fistful of ropes made from hemp, Drelrei beckoned his lover to rise. Slowly, lovingly, as one, they sewed their bodies together with the hempen ties, flesh to flesh, bone to bone, consummating their devotion to one another by becoming Siamese twins. The needle flashed in and out of their scarlet, exposed muscle as they performed the tantric surgery, drawing them closer with every stitch until their anatomies were inextricably enmeshed.
As Siamese twins, the incubus and succubus made love. The Tantradox folded the two halves of their conjoined bodies together, like the wings of a butterfly, satyriasis and nymphomania merging into one tantric continuum. Drelrei caressed the black nipples upon Junisia's swollen breasts with his clawed and cloven hand, while she in turn fondled his disproportionately large genitals with tapered fingers and curled fingernails.
Drelrei massaged the two small horns on Junisia's forehead and wrapped himself in her twining ankylosaurus tail. Junisia ran her palm and her sable scalplock along the black dragon scales that ran from Drelrei's skull all the way down his spine, to the morning star of spikes at the tip of his stegosaurus tail. They kissed with opium breath that drugged them even further, biting each other with black fangs, probing one another with barbed alien tongues and mouths within mouths within mouths. Junisia's ten clitorises resonated in perfect synchronicity with Drelrei's ten testicles.
As they lay together some time later in postcoital serenity, Drelrei whispered to Junisia, "Soon, my love, we shall become the Jh'a'vyraa. Everyone, the entire universe, will be dead, and then, at last, we can be alone."
Junisia sighed and kissed her Siamese twin lover as he ran his cloven hand along her hundredfold labia. She caught the tip of his monstrous phallus and its cavernous crimson opening in her thin fingertips as he did so. For the rest of the day the Tantradox lay entwined with itself upon the gradually flattening flowerbed, trampling the fragrant petals beneath their tantric intercourse. During periods of postcoital tranquility they philosophized together, imbibing wine and nectar from golden chalices arabesqued with tantric erotica, whose handles were caryatids and telemones. They ingested various torrefied herbs, petals, and leaves from pornographically sculpted hookahs and syringes.
From time to time they were visited by Pestilentia, Empress of Insects, who had followed the scent of opium and opium trances alike, the sickly sweet sugars of sperm and milk, and the stench of freshly severed limbs to the garden planet. A titaness the size of a spaceship, Pestilentia was a living death-trap whose flesh was a golden-brown melange of honey, opium, amber, and ectoplasm, within which could be seen the trapped and perfectly preserved corpses of thousands of insects, beasts, and demons. Her body was jointed and segmented like machinery. Her hindlegs were the powerful jumping catapults of the flea, her forelegs the incessantly cleaning, prehensile appendages of the fly, and her pincers the lethal forceps of the praying mantis. A giant scorpion's tail had been bestowed upon her by her sister, Spidratha, a stinger the size of a lance, dripping with deadly venoms. Her massive wings were the wings of the wasp, her plastron and carapace the impenetrable shell of the cockroach, her mouth the mandibled reaper of the locust, her nose the proboscine siphon of the mosquito, and her eyes the multiple, window-paned ommatidia of the spider. She had long, brown, semiliquid hair which flowed like syrup over her spiky back, towering and teeming termite mounds for breasts, and a bee hive for a vagina. Her entire body was honeycombed and served as a hive for millions of living insects, those that managed to avoid the sticky trap of her flesh, flying and crawling through the black, shadowy spaces between her joints and segments, and in and out of her eyes, proboscis, mouth, nipples, vagina, dorsal spikes, stinger, and other various orifices and tunnels, both natural and unnatural. She hovered on loudly whirring wings above the conjoined lovers, watching them with a myriad of voyeuristic eyes.
Pestilentia flitted in and out of their circle throughout the day, visiting them during each postcoital meditation, sometimes bringing them offerings of opium which they all smoked together. As the sun set, the ruler of all insects offered the lovers one million sacrificial victims for usage in their mutations and genetic experiments. Pestilentia, however, was a bitch deity and a destruction addict, and desired in return the devourment of several crops and the infestation of several gardens.
"Begone, virulent one," Drelrei commanded, and Pestilentia flew back into the cosmos amidst a cacophonous buzzing of wings and a high-pitched chirping of curses, heading back towards whatever planet she'd been ravaging before being distracted by the scent of their ceremony, or perhaps retreating to her mysterious Darkhive, or the clandestine, cabalistic, fabled lair of her reclusive lover, Lord Panzebub, the location of which was known to none save the insect kingdom and omniscient Satan in Hell below.
Later that evening, Drelrei and Junisia began the three-day copulation that would complete their metamorphosis. Inside a greenhouse pagoda of the Fiendfarms, the Tantradox made love to itself, heliotropic plants growing and blooming toward the burning light of their souls, the smell of recently-smoked opium and jasmine-scented aphrodisiacs strong in the perfumed air. The Tantradox seduced itself in a shower of moonbeams, refracted by the skylights above into a jewelled rainfall. Throughout and around the white marble palace of the Fiendfarms they continuously made love, rolling through the gardens, courtyards, greenhouses, pagodas, menageries, laboratories, abattoirs, and Stormtower of their citadel, and through the acres of towering psychedelic crops and multi-colored flowerbeds surrounding it. Their tantric sex nursed them both back to health, its healing powers cauterizing, closing, and hermetically sealing their wounds. Even their scars dissipated, leaving behind healthy, continual bridges of flesh.The Tantradox committed sexual suicide and sexual homicide, one Siamese twin at a time, with hara-kiri thrusts of Drelrei's penis and hara-kiri impalings of Junisia's womb, and torture rack stretchings of Drelrei's lingham by Junisia's yoni, wringing the sperm from Drelrei's turgid member. One Siamese twin at a time, the Tantradox's two souls traveled in and out of their respective body-halves, joining their astrosomes so that they would now astrally project as a single entity, and, if ever they were damned to Hell, they would be eternally tortured as one single spirit. Gradually, throughout this sexual ritual, their sewn-together flesh melded seamlessly, while their heartbeats, their breaths, and all their inner processes and bodily functions synchronized. Their biorhythms and astrologies aligned. They soon discovered, in their newly transmogrified form, that they could feel each other's orgasms. They were a single demon now, twice as powerful as before, ready to battle the universe with their sexual sorceries and become the Jh'a'vyraa.
On the fourth day the Tantradox emerged from the Fiendfarms onto a balcony ringed with caryatid and telamone balusters. The balcony projected from the citadel's front and overlooked a pair of Siamese twin brontosauruses below. The behemoths had been naturally conjoined inside their shared egg and thusly hatched and raised, an extremely rare phenomenon of genetics and evolution which, like other rare freakish geminis throughout Elasvai's beast and demon populations, had been worshipped by Drelrei and Junisia for centuries.
The dinosaurs were restrained by a spiked leather harness which girdled their immense torsos and yoked their scaly girth to the Fiendfarms with multiple leashes and reins. With a whip in each hand, the Tantradox urged the brontosauruses forward, dragging the entire stone-wheeled citadel over the ground and across the garden planet like some megachariot.
The effects of the opium, lotus, and psychedelic aphrodisiacs faded as Drelrei and Junisia were borne along in their mobile fortress, gazing upon the landscapes of their lush and paradisiacal world. The ritual was complete. Where there had been pain, there was now only pleasure. Where there had been superfluous limbs, there was now only union. Where there had been two, there was now one. Drelrei and Junisia had been permanently fused into the Tantradox, and, together, as a single entity, they shared a single dream, a single destiny, and a single raison'd'etre: to slay the universe so they could be alone, in
Siamese twin sadomasochistic ecstasy, for all of eternity, the way true incubus and succubus lovers should be.
25
The Omnibeast swooped down like a bird of prey from outer space, its behemoth shadow creating artificial nights in the jungles, forests, and fields over which it soared, awakening nocturnal animals in its dark and mammoth wake. The bestial spaceship's four figureheads spun on a spinal axis buried deep in its skeleton, its bones shifting like tectonic plates, an intricate orthomachine. The Overdragon breathed flames across the garden planet of Elasvai, igniting forest fires that dotted the landscape with bright orange conflagrations, like the calderas of lit pipes or the tips of hemp-filled cigarettes. Scythetooth caught bats, black eagles, and harpies out of mid-air, impaling them on his titanic fangs or engulfing them with one bite, chewing them up in the iron maiden of his teeth or swallowing them whole. War Mantis, likewise, grabbed pterodactyls as they flew past, gripping them tight in his pincers and biting their heads off with one swift motion, then casting their decapitated bodies to the ground below.
Chariah flew the Omnibeast from the womblike cockpit deep in the spaceship's interior, using oracles to navigate and telepathic umbilical cords to steer and command his bestial vessel. As he gazed through the window-like oracles throughout the chamber, he noticed that War Mantis was not decapitating his prey once, but twice, thrice, and sometimes even more. The demon raised the optic umbilical cords of Scythetooth to his crimson eyes and watched as the fanged beast snatched hordes of bats and other flying creatures out of the skies with his towering incisors and masticated their broken-winged flesh. Each of the bats had two or three heads or more. One had eight. Every manner of animal consumed by the sabre-toothed figurehead, from dragonflies to hawks to harpies, had multiple heads. He observed the pterodactyls struggling in the deadly embrace of War Mantis, and discovered the same phenomenon. The insect figurehead was decapitating each winged dinosaur more than once, but each head shared a single body. They were all conjoined beasts. Siamese twins.
The surreal revelation elicited a nameless response in the Necrodelic. There was something disturbing, something unnatural about the mutants that he couldn't quite identify, a vague sense of perverted nature and alien philosophies at work, with a twist of angst, dread, and nausea. The flight of some was unbalanced and erratic, often seeming drunken or epileptic. It was as if they soared with a limp or a damaged nervous system, lurching, staggering, flailing. Their sense of balance and equilibrium had been upset, and the distribution of their body weight was uneven. Many of them were visibly suffering. Sometimes tragic, sometimes repulsive, and always hypnotically surreal, they were among the strangest abominations the Necrodelic had ever witnessed.
Preoccupied with his observations of the menagerie of conjoined animals, Chariah flew the Omnibeast into a trap. The spaceship skimmed along the treetops of a massive forest, whose trees were several miles tall and whose canopy camouflaged all beneath it. Upon closer examination, the Necrodelic found that the green leaves which formed the treetops were not leaves at all, but fingers and phalluses. Their green was the green of reptile scales. The scales did not form one continuous integument, however, but were each a separate entity, phalanges and genitals rustling in the winds like hair or fields of grass, parting and rearranging. Entire hands, with anywhere from three to a hundred fingers, were folded together as though in prayer, or clasped one another as though in greeting. Some of the hands had ophidian fingers, rising like cobras and erections. Fingers reached out or balled themselves into fists. Penises twined between both fingers and each other. Hands masturbated phalluses like snake handlers. Curved fingers performed fellatio on penises. The treetops were a writhing, seething mass of life.
It was through this scaly, sentient, living integument that the branches of the forest suddenly reached upwards, and the branches were made not of wood, but of flesh, with fingers and phalluses for twigs, and mouths and vaginas for knotholes. They grabbed at the Omnibeast with their million writhing limbs, grappling, clawing, pulling the bestial spaceship down from the sky. Chariah channeled all his dark energy into the spaceship, and it struggled like a fly in a spiderweb, rising against the living tethers, trying desperately to escape the tangled trappings of the Forest of Flesh. The murderous maws of Scythetooth and War Mantis amputated branches left and right, ripping them from their trunks and tossing their dismembered remnants high into the air. The mutilated trees dripped not sap, but blood, as crimson and viscous as that of an animal.
The Overdragon breathed fire and the reaching limbs blackened, their burned skin blistering, cracking, and crumbling. Still, the Forest of Flesh dragged the Omnibeast inexorably downward, its Arachniotics kicking frantically, its mouths screaming, its eyes agape in horror. Every time its living branches were severed or destroyed, the Forest of Flesh, like a hydra, immediately regenerated longer, more powerful limbs in greater numbers. Every time one of its soldiers were wounded or killed, its army swelled in numbers. The battle was a downward spiral. The Forest of Flesh paradoxically multiplied via reduction, and was fortified by its own destruction. The more Chariah and the Omnibeast fought, the stronger their enemy became, like a gargantuan virus mutating and evolving over time, responding to every cure by becoming even more powerful.
The Darkworm was subdued and used like a rope by the trees to help rein the spaceship in. The Omnibeast roared and fought madly, but was finally swallowed up by the Forest of Flesh and bound tightly by the countless prehensile appendages which formed its branches. The roots of the trees were intestines, and these rose from the ground like hatching serpentlings to help subdue and bind the spaceship. After mere minutes, the Omnibeast hung like a corpse from a gallows in the viselike living branches, suspended in mid-air over the visceral forest floor. The canopy of the Forest of Flesh had closed its scaly, hairlike integument over its captor, camouflaging it in their midst from any who soared above. The Omnibeast had been captured in a natural cage, a prisoner of the garden planet.
The Forest of Flesh not only resembled an organism, but it possessed and utilized tools like one as well. The mouth of the Overdragon was bound shut with lengths of black barbed wire. The pincers of the War Mantis were immobilized in adamantium handcuffs. A giant iron wrecking ball served as a ball gag for Scythetooth. The Darkworm had been choke-collared from base to tip. The eight heads of the Hydratowers were each restrained by garrotes. The eight legs of the Arachniotics were broken and placed in sadomasochistic bondage-slings and spiked casts, the type that dominatrices with a fetish for broken bones used upon their lovers and victims. The tips of the spider appendages were inserted into giant thumbscrews. The Omnibeast was thoroughly and utterly imprisoned and immobilized in the Forest of Flesh.
As the trees twitched and their wounds healed, a dark red stain was growing in the underbelly of the Omnibeast. Internal injuries seemed to be leaking blood to its nadir, where it pooled against the flesh from within. Pieces of plastron became soaked with plasma and fell away. The stain grew more and more crimson within the flesh, and the bolus of blood pushed at the black skin of the Omnibeast like a fetal incubus about to be born. Blood spattered the forest floor far below. The underbelly of the Omnibeast swelled up like an impregnated womb, distended with internal hemorrhaging. The blood began to spill more freely. Shadowy forms stretched against the tissues of the spaceship's abdomen. The wet sound of placentas ripping and tearing filled the forest air. A crimson shower of blood poured from a new orifice in the Omnibeast's underbelly, dousing the ground below. With a burst of darkness and amniotic fluid, the Necrodelic tore through the ventral flesh of the Omnibeast with his bladelike claws, ripping himself out of his spaceship from to dangle from a grappling hook embedded in the Omnibeast's guts, then riding a black length of coil and a crimson cataract of blood to freedom. The vermilion waterfall splashed into the swamp of the forest floor. Chariah landed gently in the marsh, aided by the grapnel lodged in the innards of the Omnibeast miles above.
The Necrodelic tugged upon th
e coil, and a pentagram-shaped grappling hook fell from above as if summoned to his hand. The lengthy cord retreated into a thin scabbard carved beneath the skin of the Necrodelic's wrist and forearm. He caught the spinning pentagram deftly in his right hand, where it lodged in five small sheaths of flesh inside his palm, ready to be whipped out again in a nanosecond, if necessary.
Chariah looked around and began to walk through the Forest of Flesh. The marshlike surface was rotten, composed of the fluids, regurgitations, excrements, and diseases of its trees. A brackish, mephitic, knee-deep melange of blood, pus, vomit, bile, amnion, sperm, fungus, leprosy, decay, and half-submerged body parts formed a swamp of gore. The Necrodelic shuddered as he waded through the sludge, his aversion to water, even in such a semi-liquid state, briefly overwhelming his flesh.
Branches swung at the Necrodelic with fists and slashed at him with claws. The mighty demon severed limbs with dark efficiency, leaving them to writhe in the murky swamps like feeding crocodiles. They were replaced almost immediately, in multitude. The intestines which formed the Forest of Flesh's roots reared up like cobras as Chariah passed. Those that attacked were sundered. The entrails pumped nourishment to the trees from the soil in a sort of perverted digestive system, a reverse digestive system whose strange purpose was unknown. Their strange black foodstuff poured into the swampy waters as they were sliced in half.
