Legacy of Judas - Book One

by Aragon, Christian

  While holding the infant boy during the killings of his other family members, this female was as oblivious as the baby was to the surrounding activities. The two simply looked into each other’s eyes. She knew then the way of life they had been living was a travesty, a tragedy, and a grotesque example. She knew as she looked into this infant’s eyes she could not continue like this, but she did not know how to stop. Then her hesitation cost her and the infant as a long, narrow blade was suddenly plunged into the soft spot of the infant’s skull and pierced all the way through to his internal organs. A portion of the blade split the infant’s throat from his chin to the jugular notch causing the infant’s blood to spray and drench this woman’s chubby face. The infant’s now lifeless body was pulled from her arms and handled like a slab of meat at the butcher; his arms and legs limp and dangling. Her father slapped her when he noticed a tear fall from her eye. He held the infant boy on his blade and swung the lifeless child to her mother for her to prepare and cook. Soon the smell of the gutted infant’s tender flesh popping and sizzling over the flames mixed with the few herbs and spices they had to flavor their meals with.

  She ate her fill that night just as she had every time prior this family fed on the flesh of others. This time she knew it was wrong and she knew she would be punished.

  The following day, in the town where the children and the old woman were taken from, the people organized and began a search for those missing. It took two days of searching the outlying areas and speaking with sheepherders and other nomads, but eventually they came upon the temporary home of the family who was clearly not suffering from the same shortage of food as everyone else in this part of the land. Once the evidence they needed was found in a refuse pile they hauled off the entire family to the town the abductions were committed in. The father was the first one slowly put to death by being bound then chopped into pig fodder starting with his feet. The town’s thinning pigs were to finally receive some real nourishment as this young woman watched with a bittersweet tear in her eye. The knowledge this was no longer going to happen to anyone else because of her family gave her a taste of peace. The knowledge she had so willingly accepted her family’s behavior as just providing for their survival tortured her to her core.

  She shed many more tears once it was she on the chopping block. Unlike her parents and siblings though, she did not beg for mercy, nor did she allow herself to scream out in pain until it was too much to bear. She deserved this, and what was to follow, and she damn well knew it! She accepted it. Now she’s before a Judas who didn’t exist before a few moments prior, in a place of cold and fear and suffering.

  “Perhaps, Judas, this would be someone to have your way with? An initiation to quench the thirst for the fleshy and deviant desires you weren’t as easily able to quell whilst alive, yes?” A small grin formed from Judas’s dark lips as his own will rotated the female before him, like a pig over a fire, so he could examine her offerings. It was only when Judas brought her around face to face that a new look of terror overcame the woman. In the darkness she could make out Judas’s form and features, but couldn’t handle the sight of him. She suddenly lost consciousness before being able to let out so much as a whimper of her horror. Again Judas rotated her, this time into a prone position where she was belly-down facing the anguish which awaited her. The darkness around them reached out, grasped her pudgy ankles and wrists, and pulled her into a spread position until she was taught. Judas was staring at her fatty womanhood as his newly misshapen manhood twitched and slithered and became rigid with the thoughts of the coming violation. In moments it stood proudly outward from Judas with a thickness and length not unlike a strong man’s arm; a head which was more like several such heads melded together into a hideous mass with several blind eyes opening and it dripping with anticipation.

  Judas placed his erectness just at the opening of her plump fruits and it was in that moment consciousness flowed back into her. She first felt her restraints and struggled to distinguish them from the surrounding darkness. Then she felt the beckoning of Judas between her legs and quickly strained her neck to gain sight of what was transpiring at her exposed gateways.

  A sudden, powerful thrust …

  Her screams of pain and terror would be etched into Judas’s memory forever as the sweetest cries he could’ve hoped for during this moment. His first thrust spread her, and then tore her in more than one direction as he buried himself to his dangling sack. Blood poured from her mouth and from the now larger and shared opening Judas had created. Her pain was intensified as small thorn-like protrusions formed down the length of Judas’s hellish instrument as he found a fevered pitch to his liking and for her destruction and torment. His ultimate moment boiled up from within him causing his movements to become spastic and erratic. Then Judas arched and let his head fall back as he spasmed, lunged forward, and his upper body slapped against her fatty backside. Out of reflex he wrapped his arms around her as best he could to the point of his hands barley meeting across her great belly as his talon-clad fingers easily pierced her flesh. Judas reached his peak and he felt his explosion forcing him further into her as they both cried out, but for entirely different reasons. The force of his expulsion into her was one of the most horrible pleasures he couldn’t have ever imagined possible. Her screams were the purest agony from within both body and soul, and he found the screams to be enhanced pleasantly by the sounds of her blood spilling from her every orifice. With another great spasm and jerk Judas pulled back causing his serrated talons to slice open the girl’s bulging belly from center to sides; she went silent from the shock of seeing and feeling her entrails fall from her body and into the darkness. Her bulbous body slipped from his rigid impalement; her arms and legs limp and dangling as she followed her entrails towards the red glow in the distance.

  Judas was surprised by what he saw still sheathed around his semi-rigid grotesqueness; the blackened, defiled soul of the fat girl almost separated from its fleshen body. Long, wet strands of it stretched without breaking all the way to the fleshen body dropping rapidly into the distance. Satan gripped the twitching soul and pulled the blackened, tar-like mass from Judas, and then turned it to face Judas. A faint glow of a pale blue left over from this soul’s innocence, but within seconds that pale blue turned a deep shade of red as her damnation settled in.

  “This is only a taste of what I have bestowed upon you. You have the ability to inflict torment beyond what the flesh will allow by itself. You can see, feel, manipulate, and read each and every soul falling to us, and each is yours to do with at will, what you will, without answering to anyone except me. Shall we continue?” And with a whip-like motion Satan discards the darkened soul. It snaps back to its defiled and slaughtered flesh in the distance.

  Judas, feeling incredibly refreshed, was more than happy to return to the project at hand. Again he focused his concentration on the screams from below. Again the screams came closer and grew louder. Soon he was able to see the first hints of what he had to work with as his red, glassy eyes opened wider and became wild with anticipation.

  Journal entry III

  It was just a massive, red orb at first, and then as it got closer to Judas the horrible details became vividly apparent. A sphere, a massive sphere, easily as large as the moon Judas loved to sit and gaze at during his mortal life, was made up entirely of fleshen souls. They were all caught in an endless cycle of torment as the terrible cold of God’s Shadow would begin freezing and cracking their naked flesh; inflicting pain to the point of causing their base survival instincts to take over. These souls felt the shared body heat within the great orb being generated by all the others. Instinctively they start clawing and tearing their way inside in a battle with all the others to reach the warmth. The closer they get to the center the more of themselves would be torn and shredded away by all the others with the same goal. They have no recollections of how many times they’ve done this. Their fleshen bodies become grizzly fragments, only bound together by the thin sin
ew of their strained souls. The bloody, mangled parts and portions are slowly pushed back to the outer layer by the pressure and motion of those still fighting their way in. Once back on the outside of this mass, the parts of the bodies and souls reunite themselves, and due to shock and the emotional overload of their situation they have no memory of the struggle which just took place. Consciousness returns, the cold chills them to skeletons, and survival instinct reasserts itself as they renew their fight back into the bloody sphere. Back in for warmth and safety which would never be theirs again. This was a hell, but on this day it was no longer to be the Hell.

  For the first time since Judas fell into the darkness he had a place to set his feet and contemplate his next act. He looked about in amazement of the size of the mass he stood upon; the wriggling of skin, muscle, and even bone, wetted slick by sweat, blood, and piss, almost massaging and tickling his feet. Then his amazement became greater with the realization of the sheer numbers of people it takes to make up such a mass of torment and pain; and that's when his mind begins to work.

  “How long have people been collecting here? Are all of these people from one religion?”

  “Since the first person who realized one could do right or wrong by one’s own standards, and the standards of others, they have been collecting here. Since the first coffer was filled with the transgressions against others or against self, people have felt that they must be punished for what they believed to be evil.” Satan replied calmly; almost solemnly, but seemed pleased about Judas embracing what was before him.

  Judas could feel Satan growing impatient while trying to give him room to think and act, and finally Judas knew what to do first. From the crown of thorns which grew from Judas’s head, he snapped off a single thorn, yelling in pain for the moment it took to grow back. He then looked about the landscape he stood upon and found a suitable subject. Nearby a woman was reforming from her thorough dismantling within suffering orb. Her belly was almost reformed when Judas thrust the thorn point into her flesh and imbedded it in the outer layer of her womb. Human anatomy was now his knowledge in every last detail as it would be to many more in Hell’s future. The sharp little quill twitched, spiraled, and burrowed into the woman’s uterus just before her body and soul completely reassembled and she regained consciousness. Quickly her eyes opened, she screamed at the sight of Judas and the bite of the cold, and then began her fight back into the bloody mass completely unaware of what was growing within her.

  Several hours went by before the first hints of Judas’s creation came to pass. The somewhat rhythmic motions of the surface where Judas stood began to spasm, gently at first but enough for Judas to notice a difference in the movement below his feet. Within the sphere Judas could hear screams unlike those he was now accustomed to hearing. The fleshy ground began to tremble violently as a short distance from Judas bodies, souls, and parts of both exploded into the dark air with all the ferocity and force of a small erupting volcano. Blood spewed into the cold air with such force that soon crimson snow began to fall gently on and around Judas.

  Though he knew of snow in Life, this was his first contact with it. He stuck his forked tongue out into the cold air and caught several of the cold, crystalline-blood flakes. The quaking below his feet ceased.

  Before Judas stood the first of what he christened his Thorn Minion. It’s a massive beast standing the height of no less than two men, with dark reddish-gray skin, a blood-red face and its two glassy, black eyes. The great beast hath no mouth for the creature need not ever eat or speak. It hath no nose, snout; nostrils or even lungs to collect air for the creature need not ever breathe. From its barely human-shaped face to the tips of its limbs the beast is covered in varying sizes of ivory-white thorns, or quills, if you will, starkly contrasting the darkness of its own form even while standing there drenched in blood. Just below the elbows of its thin, almost skeletal looking arms, its forearms come to a nub and massive quills, three to five cubits in length, jut out in a gradual arcs and replace what would be considered as the forearms and hands; five great quills, two of which are formed in opposing arcs creating hands of three great quills acting as three-fingered hands each with two thumbs, but which are capable of articulation only at their great knuckles just below the elbows. Its legs are long and like those of dog’s hind legs, though bald and smooth as with the rest of the beast. Smaller but varyingly sized quills trace vaguely organized patterns down the legs to where an ankle should be, but just below that joint, just as with the arms, there is a set of great knuckles and more quills longer, and thicker at their bases, than those of the arms. All of these come to needle-sharp points and with edges sharper than any Mankind has yet devised. Despite the beast’s lumbering form the weight of the creature does not pierce all the way through the bodies below, which is strange at first, but as we’ve come to learn, gravity doesn't work here as it does in the mortal realm.

  At the risk of becoming overly descriptive for this mortal child, I’m taking the liberty of putting to use the talents of those artistic souls who are bound to the book to give illustrations of such beasts as this, and anything else worth getting descriptive about. Ultimately I don’t know that this child will be capable of fathoming all which is contained, and will be contained, within this journal, but I may as well make the best of it; specially since I do not know if I’ll ever have the opportunity again to enjoy such a simple pleasure as writing once this mortal has finally fallen victim to the legacy.

  Suffice it to say this first beast was instantly granted the status of General of the Thorn Minion. The General multiplied its numbers by snapping off tips of its quills and dropping the tips at random into the writhing bodies below it. Its own quill tips would grow back as the broken ones simultaneously imbedded themselves into the bodies of the men and women below it. After the General the new Thorn knew instinctively what their first tasks were to be and set about doing them for what would be a length of time equal to only seven days, but only because there were so many created so quickly, and not one single moment was spent at rest from their tasks. The Thorn’s oversized bodies are limber, agile, and their huge quill-like digits much more dexterous than one would imagine. Each of the new Thorn is different from the rest in form and how it used its quills and moved about. One such Thorn — fondly known as Pinwheels — massive as it is, has a form something like an axle with a wagon wheel at each end; hellish, grotesque wagon wheels, with quills of varying lengths and configurations jutting out in all directions, and a bulbous form in the middle of the axle with multiples of black, glassy eyes looking about in all directions. This specific Thorn has no purpose other than rolling though Hell piercing the damned just to add to their torment. There are others we’ve since nicknamed as well; such as Black Cypress, Meat Train, and a personal favorite of mine simply referred to as The Wyrm. I’ll have to make sure an illustration of that one is created, but to say that was the strangest one wouldn't be true. Trying to describe the forms of some of the others would simply be too laborious and wordy.

  The next task many of the Thorn set to was the creation of a pedestal with a throne atop it for Judas to set upon. Since there was no earth nor stone; no wood or metals in Hell of any kind, all structures are constructed from the fleshen bodies of the damned including the landscape of Hell itself.

  The pedestal for the throne of Hell was ultimately a spiraling mass of twisted broken and contorted people. Their naked bodies were stretched, twisted, cracked, snapped, and put to positions the Thorn innately knew would be best for the support of the throne, but with no regard for the damned. This is Hell after all. No torture goes wasted.

  At the height of at least ten men above the slowly reforming landscape the Thorn constructed the great throne of pain and torment for Judas to sit upon and oversee the creation of Hell’s new landscape.

  The Thorn Minion created the landscape of Hell by fusing all the bodies of the fleshen-damned to one other. They sliced the flesh of the damned from the crown at the back of their scalp
s down the center of their backs and of their limbs, and then peeled the flesh outward but not off of the bodies entirely, only just far enough to expose the muscles, veins, and raw nerves of the backside of their skulls, torsos and limbs.

  The Thorn Minion are deaf to the sounds of the tormented as they place the bodies like grotesque puzzle pieces to build whatever Judas instructs. The configurations of quills of some of the Thorn are well adapted to the tasks of slicing and interweaving the skin, muscle, and even the veins and nerves of each person to the flesh of the next. Once the damned are fastened flesh-to-flesh, and always facing inward to view the horrors of Hell, one Thorn would pierce its own body to allow the blood of Judas to spill onto the raw seams between the damned. The blood of Judas would cause the raw, irritated flesh to heal together, for lack of a better term, with each person’s flesh fastened to the next creating a lumpy and twisted scar tissue which never quite heels, but gives a much more permanent bond to the work being done. The damned wriggle, squirm, and shout in pain until their throats bleed, but they cannot break free of their new confines and constructs; they feel every second of the pain from this process as if they were experiencing it in life.

  I can’t help but wonder if the damned would now prefer the great moon of suffering to their new suffering. But that’s enough of that thought.

  This process continued on until the moon of torment was refashioned into a landscape of torment that conformed to specifications dictated by Judas. Hell was formed into a great cavern with massive, twisting columns of flesh connected the walls and the ceiling to the floors in random patterns. Gravity here is unlike anything man will ever know. There is no true up or down, but more so as if the world we knew as mortals was turned inside out with the gravity now pulling from the outside; from all directions in cylindrical fashion. Judas and his Thorn Minion can walk every portion of Hell without falling or extra effort to hold on because upside-down, sideways and diagonals no longer mean anything here.