Demonmachy: Demonic Apocalypse (Messiah of Death) Read online

  Just as the Oneirophage preferred the more powerful dreams of living organisms, he knew also that appendages could become repositories and escape routes for dreams. Thus, his feast had to be properly prepared. So, as he did every night, the Oneirophage herded the manacled victims toward the Amputator, the gargantuan, imposing limbing machine in the southern wing of the bedchamber. Fourteen prey, Morpheus Rex had captured for him. Fourteen skulls worth of dreams, he would eat and drink this night.

  With death's own gaze the prism-eyed demon arranged his sacrifices outside the mechanical jaws of the Amputator. The prisoners were bolted in iron collars by abdomen and throat to a lengthy, gem-encrusted surgical table, upon which they lay supine and prostrated. The long adamantium chains that had bound them to the floor, ceiling, walls, and each other were now manacled to hooks on either side of the limbing machine's innards. The chains held their captives tautly spread-eagled, arms and legs extended like living pentagrams, horizontally crucified. The fourteen pentagrams of flesh were bound in a straight line upon the elongated, jeweled, bloodstained platform, which now looked eerily like the feasting tables in the dining halls of cannibal emperors.

  The Oneirophage slithered to the giant wheel protruding from the side of the Amputator. He it and began to slowly turn, grinding the gears of the mutilation machine. The surgical table bearing the captives lurched and began to move inexorably into the bowels of the Amputator. Four blades fell simultaneously, followed immediately by the wet thud of four severed limbs striking the floor.

  Screams tore the night air as a second body was dragged beneath the guillotines. The first was conveyed deeper into the Amputator, past two walls of open flames that cauterized the wounds at shoulders and hips, preserving both life and dreams, before depositing the limbless prey in an obsidian cage.

  The Oneirophage observed the severing mechanisms of the gruesome device as he operated it. The sight of naked flesh, the sounds of terrified screams, and the smell of blood made the Oneirophage's dream-cravings even more intense. His prismatic eyes gleamed with lust, his three forked tongues licked his dripping fangs and rainbow lips. His chiseled muscles stood out against his skin while he toiled, bringing the runes and images of the tattoos which covered his entire body to life. Flames flickered, weapons flashed, zodiacs rotated and orbited upon his painted flesh like sentient artwork. Death's heads and demon faces smiled and snarled, serpents and beasts hunted and flew, incubi and succubi copulated and battled. A thousand images writhed as the sinews beneath them moved, tinged with the blood the Oneirophage was sweating as he operated the mechanism. Crimson perspiration soaked his long, brown, prism-plaited hair and beard, and ran down his body as his cravings deepened and his withdrawals intensified. One by one the victims were limbed, cauterized, and collected. After mere minutes, the ceremony was complete.

  The Oneirophage began to gather up his limbed prey, gripping handfuls of hair, or fistfuls of genitals, and tossing the amputees upon his roseate, gore-stained blankets in a pile of flesh. The Oneirophage grabbed the Umbilicus, a hollow, strawlike sorcerer's wand capable of infinite permutations and surgical functions.

  Holding the Umbilicus in one manicured hand, each long fingernail painted with various sigils and mandalas, he observed the victims writhing on his bed, their still-sizzling armholes and legholes sticking to the blankets and leaking black pus. He leaned over a pale green female, her naked, limbless torso twitching like a large invertebrate, her breasts swinging back and forth as she wormed and writhed. He placed the straw between her emerald lips and drank deeply, sucking dreams of romance through her mouth and into his, down his throat, and into his bloodstream. Dreams of succubus lips and Satanic kisses blossomed in his brain, of vaginas and oubliettes opening and closing like mouths. The Oneirophage licked his rainbow lips with each of his three forked tongues and sighed.

  He placed the straw into the ear of a blue-skinned male and sucked again. Dreams of comets shooting up from Hell hit him in the teeth and tongues, slammed into his heart and taking him deeper into trance. Switching the Umbilicus into a triple-curled, six-pronged straw, he cleaned the blood from around the mouth and ears of the two dream-robbed husks, vacuuming up any remnants of dreams they might carry, and then placed two of the tube's ends in the eyes of a yellow-skinned male. Dreams of Satan came bubbling; he watched them travel up the straw with drugged fascination. He dreamed that he was Satan, swimming in an ocean of blood, amidst crimson mermaids whom he made love to, swimming to a heart the size of a planet. Fascinated, he placed the straw in the yellow-skinned male's nostrils, hoping to tap these archetypes again. The ocean of blood returned, he dreamt he was Satan, the red mermaids beckoned, and then the dream faded and was no more.

  Allowing the dreams to flow, for they could become lethal if he did not, the Oneirophage turned his attentions downward. He placed the now quadruple-twisted Umbilicus into a pink-skinned virgin's vagina. Pretending it was Mother Chaos, he inhaled, drawing in sexual fantasies and sadomasochistic nightmares. The Oneirophage dreamt that his twin penises were releasing pink, perfumed semen. Not yet satisfied, he placed the straw at the tip of a purple-scaled incubus' penis, bringing forward through the urethra first dreams, then sperm, then blood, a mixture which influenced the Oneirophage's dreams toward the coming of the Jh'a'vyraa. Feeling as if his mind's eye had become infinitely more focused, the Oneirophage dreamt of becoming the Jh'a'vyraa, of attaining that state of bliss beyond rebirth, where Satan could not terrify him with excruciating nightmares, fear injections, venereal paranoias, primal instincts, and suicidal tendencies. As the Jh'a'vyraa, he would torture himself eternally, masturbate eternally, and dream eternally. The euphoric dark enlightenments of pain, sex, and evil would be forever bound to his soul.

  For hours, the Oneirophage drained the limbed bodies of their dreams, imbibing most of their blood, and eating some of their flesh and organs as well. His final dream-visions were of the Necrodelic, his dark soulmate, his nemesis, whom he must soon fight to the death. He observed the flesh-smoker's methods of battle, his strengths, his weaknesses. He dreamed of scalping the Necrodelic, creating a bloody oracle upon his glistening, gory skull. He peered through the crown of the Necrodelic's head and watched the dreams flow through his black brain. The dreams were memories of past slaughters and prophecies of massacres yet to come, and the Oneirophage saw that the Necrodelic received his sorcerous powers from death.

  Dreams of Mother Chaos filled the scalped-skull oracle now, and the Oneirophage saw that she was the Necrodelic's soulmate. Mesmerized by their second dream encounter of the night, the Oneirophage drifted once more into a concatenation of erotic fantasies, a sexual reverie that bore him past the threshold of midnight and into deeper slumber.

  As sperm, blood, and venom fountained from his two erect penises, splattering his unconscious body in the name of the Mistress of Entropy, the Oneirophage's astral body arose from the sanguinary, corpse-laden covers and projected into the night. For a time he soared over the red and black wastelands of Grystiawa in his nightly travels, scouting the living and haunting the newly dead, escorting them downward, ever downward, to the boundaries of Hell. He observed and dreamt of those whom he would stalk the following day, singling out the weak, the sick, and the old, forming battle-strategies for the coming dawn, when he would once again assume the role of the hunter and the beast, the Dreaming Predator, Morpheus Rex. He dreamt also that, in the near future, he became the hunted.

  His brain turgid with dreams, the Oneirophage slept, his wandering soul soaring wistfully through realms of ephemera and phantasmagoria. Above Grystiawa, Tyterviax shone on. Beyond the crimson sun space continued to grow blacker and blacker, with death and with evil, as the eons passed. Elsewhere, somewhere, or perhaps nowhere, beyond everything Satan had ever created, salvation awaited the conqueror of the universe, for whosoever survived armageddon, whomever became the last entity or pair of soulmates left alive at the end of time, would become the Jh'a'vyraa, the Messiah of Death, and attain infinite
peace. Every other soul in existence would rot in Hell, for all eternity. Of this, the Oneirophage dreamt until waking.

  *

  The crimson dawn was like surgery, the red sun Tyterviax a bleeding tumor cut from the flesh of night. Beams of morning light revealed the badlands of Grystiawa like scalpels and daggers exposing inner organs. Red dunes and pieces of desert opened like wounds before the stabbing illumination. Mountain ranges glistened like exposed spines. Like surgery, the seasons changed, the eons passed, the stars and planets revolved in orbit, and so too did the Grystiawan night pass once more into day.

  Surgical, as well, was the psychic mutation of the Oneirophage. The rebirth of Morpheus Rex, and the limbo of the Oneirophage, were samsaric surgeries, a metamorphosis of the spirit, like the cycles of reincarnation stretching from the genesis of the universe to the end of time. The soulletting was instant, at the exact nanosecond of sunrise, and the diurnal destroyer, the bestial slayer, the Dreaming Predator, Morpheus Rex, had arisen again.

  Morpheus Rex awakened in a mass grave, the carnage of the Oneirophage's nocturnal rituals strewn across his bloodstained bed. A cannibal's breakfast surrounded him, and he nourished himself upon raw demon meat, tearing chunks of flesh apart with sabretooth cobra fangs, swallowing inner organs whole with an anaconda's throat, and lapping up blood and other bodily fluids with his three forked tongues. Upon finishing his morning feast, Morpheus Rex licked the gore from his rainbow lips and prepared for battle.

  He was now fully awake, his instincts razor-bladed and saw-edged for the hunt. Tossing back his long, prism-plaited hair, Morpheus Rex placed the Darkprism around his neck. He exited the bedchamber, which now resembled a golgotha, and headed for the weapons gallery to retrieve his trio of hunting tools. He removed the Prismsword and the Spectrumhammer from their racks, slung the Rainbowspear over his shoulder, and then descended the sparkling stairways of his palace. With rainbows carving up the air like lasers, the Dreaming Predator stepped into his entrance hall.

  Phantasmagorika's seven heliotropic gateways had been unlocked and opened by the rays of dawn. Morpheus Rex navigated the labyrinthine, light-controlled egress of double-doors, swinging doors, trap-doors, ceiling-doors, hidden doors, and irising portals, then passed under the sparkling spikes of the heliotropically raised portcullis and over the heliotropically lowered drawbridge. The bridge led Morpheus Rex safely across a psychedelic moat of liquid hallucinogens and into his hunting grounds.

  Raising high both Prismsword and Spectrumhammer as he stood outside his resplendent palace, with the colors of his weapons reflecting and refracting all around him, and his grotesque and sinister tattoos glowing and shimmering upon his bulging muscles, Morpheus Rex let ring his piercing battle cry.

  The hunt had begun.

  3

  The Necrodelic's bestial spaceship skimmed the crimson cumulus of Grystiawa's vermilion atmosphere, its shadows falling not only upon the clouds, but into the clouds, as though they had mass and weight, or were composed of antimatter. The shadows dwelled inside the clouds like gargantuan parasites, their atramentous bodies visible through the diaphanous layers of mist like ticks nestled in flesh, or unhatched spiders gestating in translucent egg sacs.

  The nearly tangible nature of its shadow was a dark testament to the raw, pure power of the vessel and its master, as well as an ominous sigil which augured the extreme evil of the invader. Like a black hole moon, the writhing spaceship orbited the rim of the planet, dropping its shadows like omens into the clouds, across the scab-like deserts, and onto the maroon mountain ranges. With the deliberate slowness of a predator, the bestial spaceship flew closer and closer to the planet Grystiawa, until the creatures already fleeing across the wastelands could make out its sinister features with their naked eyes.

  The hideous vessel seemed to be an amalgamation of every species that had ever lived, joined together by surgery and sorcery. Appropriately named the Omnibeast, the soaring monstrosity was the result of several millennia of conquerment and enslavement, subjugation and domination, breeding and mutation, vivisection and necromancy. Dragonlike scales protruded across the ship's outer skin, vertical and diagonal mountain ranges that often converged to protect the ship's vital parts. Several of these vital parts were the Omnibeast's crimson eyes, which were now blinking open to gaze across the Grystiawan landscape. Humongous black nightworms with open-mouthed rings of sabretooth fangs, some of which dripped venom, protruded from the exterior of the mammoth vessel. Hundreds of eyestalks extended from the spaceship as well, ending in swiveling bloodshot spheres that looked about in all directions. If followed into the vessel with X-ray vision, one would see those same nightworms and eyestalks seamlessly flowing into the hundreds of umbilical cords which were ubiquitous throughout the entire spaceship, controlling it like the multi-tipped whips of a hecatoncheire dominatrix. The fleshlike tubes looped and burrowed through glands, nerves, organs, oracles, and altars of sacrifice, ultimately converging in the nexus of the vessel. Inside this central cockpit the Necrodelic's body was attached to the umbilical cords, through which he controlled the nervous system, circulatory system, digestive system, and every other aspect of the living spaceship, sometimes giving it coordinates for flights across the universe and sometimes commanding it in cataclysmic battles and apocalyptic space-wars. The umbilical cords pumped thousands of drugs and hormones, hypnotic suggestions and Satanic chantings, black electricity and sacrificial blood, into and out of the bestial spaceship's consciousness. The umbilical cords were the chains of the dungeonkeeper, the reins of the dragonrider, the whips of the beastmaster. The umbilical cords were lifelines in the black grip of the Necrodelic, and through them Chariah possessed the bestial spaceship in much the same way he often possessed the minds, the flesh, and the souls of the innocent and the damned. Through them, Chariah was at one with his sentient, intergalactic monstrosity. The bestial spaceship was an extension of the Necrodelic's dark spirit, just like a possessed victim, just like his own physical body.

  Extending from the carapace of the Omnibeast like turrets were the eight Hydratowers, rearing back on thousand-foot long necks in a circle around the center of the spaceship's roof. Each severed but still-living hydra head faced in a different direction, equidistant from one another, like the points of a compass. The eight legs of a gargantuan spider protruded from the ship's underbelly to form the Arachniotics, its landing gear. The Omnibeast also possessed four giant, living figureheads: the Overdragon, Scythetooth, War Mantis, and Darkworm. Each monstrosity had been embedded in the ship and bonded to its nervous system. The Overdragon was breathing fire from what was currently serving as the front of the spaceship, and it was before his fiery maw that the inhabitants of Grystiawa now fled. Its fanged mouth breathed the very flames of Hell from its interplanal lungs, and was capable of unleashing the fiery tornadoes and hurricanes of the infernal underworld, as well. It could destroy or devour a moon or a small planet within a matter of hours.

  The Overdragon's reptilian skull extended from a long, thick neck adorned by plates and spikes, which constantly curved and snaked and looked as though it were eternally arising for battle. His ebony head tapered into a crocodilian snout, and possessed above its crimson eyes the horns of Satan. Those horns crackled with black electricity and oozed blood from their tips during combat. They were strong enough to trigger supernovas and sharp enough to cut through the very fabric of space and time. The Overdragon's horns had been bestowed upon it by Satan himself, for the Overdragon had once been the High Priest of a race of devil-worshipping dragonmen.

  This ancient beast had been conquered long ago, during the Necrodelic's genocide of the dragonmen, and made into a living sacrifice. Subjugated to Chariah's necromancy and bonded by a blood debt, the creature had been used as the basis from which the rest of the bestial spaceship was grown. Its slanted eyes still burned red in their sockets with the wisdom of its eons of existence, but they were enslaved to their demon master, and the Overdragon had very little hope of eve
r becoming the Jh'a'vyraa. Its titanic body was now nothing more than a steed and a slave for its possessor.

  The Overdragon breathed tsunamis of flame across the badlands, searing the flesh off of various monsters and demons in less than a nanosecond and leaving mushroom clouds and billowing smoke in its wake. Charred skeletons stood amidst the conflagrations for several moments before collapsing to the scorched ground. Deserts of maroon sand transformed into plains of black glass as the Overdragon seared the planet's surface with Hellfire.

  Deep inside the Omnibeast, Chariah watched the devastation through telescopic umbilical cords. The smell of roasted flesh wafted into the cockpit in black clouds of oily smoke, transported to the chamber directly from the battlefield and exhaled by the various umbilical cords which dangled and swayed from the floor, walls, and ceiling. The Necrodelic breathed in the smoked flesh and was soon suffused with a pleasant sensation. Though far less powerful than smoking flesh from the Bloodbong, it nonetheless heightened his senses, sharpened his instincts, and induced a mild feeling of tranquility. The umbilical cords exhaled puffs of smoke like mouths, and the cockpit soon grew murky and became covered with a fine silt of ashes.

  Rhythmically breathing in and out, as though deep in meditation, Chariah telepathically flew the Omnibeast across Grystiawa, spreading genocide and coming a little closer to becoming the Jh'a'vyraa with every murder. With umbilical cords attached to his eyelids, he searched for Morpheus Rex. The ground and sky blurred past at supersonic speeds. Far below, the little creatures ran and died, and even the tallest anakim and largest nephilim seemed like insects as the flames struck them. He caught a few winged spiders in mid-air with fireballs as well. Some of the spiders exploded, while others crashed like meteors to the ground. Mountaintops whizzed by and the Overdragon assailed them with barrages of flame. Giant black tentacles reached out from the bestial spaceship and snatched organisms from caves and peaks and valleys, to be absorbed into the vessel through one of its myriad orifices and borne through its giant veins and arteries into Chariah's dungeons.