Fiction

Chapter 5: The Place of Screams

His brain lay like a shriveled, snotty mass slowly congealing back into substance. It was surrounded by atrophied, leathery remnants of flesh incased in permafrost. What remained had the texture of sand paper. Even in the freezing environment much of the body that imprisoned him had disintegrated into dust. His eyes, nose, ears, internal organs and marrow had long since been eaten by worms.

Ancient upheavals had thrust his shattered sarcophagus into the soulless air of a freezing world so desolate that only aberrant life forms now existed. Around him were wrapped winding tatters of gold upon which a strange warning had been written. The language had long been forgotten. Much of the writing was illegible. Much of it had to do with myth and magic. The fragments still legible were about a nameless terror that shattered worlds. It read in part:

In the quickening that presaged all beginnings Life with Death grew bored.
They made up their parents. Their parents grew jealous of son and daughter. They decided to destroy them before the were themselves destroyed. Realizing their danger both daughter and son destroyed their parents instead. An uneasy peace followed. Death was distrustful of Life. Life lived in fear of Death. First one and then the other gained ascendancy over the worlds they and their parents had created. Beware. Tread carefully you who wander through the wrinkled gates. Whisper no names. Protect yourself. Run from this place of screams for here lies one long vanquished but never destroyed.

The icy wind ripped at him. He was near comatose and immobile but sensed a difference. A creature the size of a fly buzzed above him. Something was different. The force that had chained his mind to what remained of his pathetic physical shell had weakened. He had survived by preying on the energy in other peoples dreams for so long that he had forgotten the pleasure in feeling his own sensations.

Physical awareness was a welcome experience. He luxuriated in it. He could smell the creature circling above him. Its objectionable odor appealed to him. Tiny meteors of light streaked through his consciousness. He was corporeal once more but because of the hollow, partial shell his body had become he remained unable to physically move. His attention focused again on the erratically flying creature. He willed it closer to him.

It had an essence he could identify with. Its motivations reeked of immediate sensation; an avoidance of pain, the urge to propagate and above all else an insatiate, overpowering hunger. He placed an illusion in its mind that his body had become a pulsating puss of green putrification. A vision of rotting entrails and steaming, gutted human flesh. It was only a question of time. It would tire soon. While it refused to land it was held by his will and prevented from leaving. It's buzzing became more agitated as if it were trying to escape. Ever so slowly its circular trajectory tightened as it dipped closer to the true reality represented by the jumble of fossilized, fragmented bones his body had become.

The winged insect was covered in hairy, diseased warts. It had trailing filaments of decaying flesh below its body. The creature was itself rotting from the inside out. Nothing lasted for long in the frozen emptiness that represented this place. His own corruption had corrupted everything around him. He refocused his thoughts and bounced them against the deformed head of the flying insect. The images he placed continued to be simple and elemental. The smells he caused it to focus on were primeval. The creature finally landed on what it believed to be a bubbling cesspool of acrid maggots and blood. It unfolded the needle like proboscis of its mouth and tried to suck up the bountiful offering of putrid filth he was offering up.

Instead, it found itself slowly being drained of its own life force. It tried to flee but couldn't and watched helplessly confused as its legs and body melted to be replaced by the genetic material of the mummy. Mental awareness was the last to go, replaced by the incredibly powerful and evil consciousness of its annihilator. The creature that flew up and away from the desiccated remains might have looked the same but it was a different thing entirely. It was now but another vessel for the voice that whispered.

He who was known by many names was finally free. His new body was primitive he admitted to himself. Yes, but he could always exchange it for another more to his liking when the opportunity presented itself. Some kind of rift in the balance of order had been fundamentally altered. He sensed that his time had come again.

Half deity, half royalty, his long imprisonment was over. It was time to leave this place. Though powerful, he was not as powerful as he once was, as he could make himself again. His was the knowledge of an entity that had once ruled worlds. He had grown beyond the notions of good and evil. All that mattered was the satisfaction of his own corrupted will and desires.

Where was she? She who had tricked him into the body he had been buried in. She had helped in immobilizing that body while he was trapped inside of it. Such strength and magic was always tied to the entity who wielded it. She must be dead or so weak that the bindings of her will had frayed. He might have forgiven her had she not provided for his ultimate humiliation. Once bound in the mummies form and chained to death, she had been responsible for his unbearable violation. She had ripped whole chunks of his strength and being from him. While such power could be taken away it could not be destroyed. His feminine half had scattered parts of him among different worlds, places, persons and things. She had disguised his broken fragments into different shapes, binding them by both science and magic depending on the time and world they were hidden in. She had been both devious and calculating. She had furthered her cunning designs by making sure he could not absorb them freely back into himself. They had to release themselves or be offered up by the consciousness in which they were bound.

His thoughts caused an angry buzz of indignation from the flying creature. Hate had helped him endure the prison of his long confinement. Retribution was the one quality beside destruction that he reveled in. He had dreamed of the humiliation and final death of his sister but it was always in the context of his being the instrument, bringing about the unendurable pain and defeat only he knew how to prolong and enjoy. Like his own resurrection, she might well rise again if not vanquished properly. She also had the power of shape changing. "No matter", the insect that now held his consciousness thought to itself. He had been preparing for this day, trapped in the impotent body of that frozen mummy for generations of lifetimes.

There were other creatures he needed to destroy in order to truly manifest himself. Pitiful creatures had to be brought under his will before becoming aware of his power that had been placed in their care. One creature in particular had a name. What was it? Yes, it was a human animal. He had visited it in his dreams. A trivial being as all humans were because they were bound to lifetimes and rarely remembered their true past. A fatal weakness. One that he was skilled in manipulating. As he had ruled worlds and destroyed them, creating new ones in their place he would do so again. This time, he would make sure there was nothing and no one left to challenge him.

The small, thinking insect buzzed in a strange way suggesting a kind of laughter. It noticed a larger creature in the shape of a distorted wasp with three heads winging its way toward it. It let the wasp climb above it as it continued to move in a straight line. The wasp dived in a killing plunge, grabbing the fly in its extended legs and bending its abdomen to repeatedly sting its captured victim. Both fell together toward the icy ground. The wasp heads feasted on their prey. As they did so the wasp became a wasp no longer. Consciousness had merely been exchanged from fly to wasp.

He who had many names, all of them whispers, exchanged one form for another,
one name for another moving inexorably up the food chain. With each transformation he or it acquired more energy. Now, a venomous flying creature the size of a large cat, it began to drone a series of notes that split the air ahead of it into a gleaming wrinkle. With a burst of wiggling motion it slipped into the wrinkle and disappeared.

When the creature appeared again it was bathed in an irritating bath of blue light tumbling down from a cloudless, peaceful sky. Gone were the monotonous plains of frozen tundra. Life teemed here. He would revel in their ultimate destruction. In his present form he was neither adapted nor prepared for the new life he faced. He would need to change his form again and fairly soon.

Looking like a nightmarish, demented vampire bat he instinctively sought refuge below the limb of an ancient tree. All life was sentient here. He could feel the trees revulsion at his presence. He fed off that energy of disgust and gained strength. It was then that he noticed what excited him even more. Surrounding both him and the tree were a group of four human warriors. On their heads were masks shaped like predatory birds. They wore loincloths of feathers. They had been guarding the voice-gate he had chosen to pass through.

With a single series of determined motions the leathery creature released its claws from the gnarled limb it hung below and tumbled toward the ground. Before its head touched the earth it swooped upright toward the four figures making ready to battle it. The first man encountered was agile but no match for the speed of the creature and the paralyzing venom dripping from its mouth. Another warrior quickly went down while the remaining two placed themselves back to back in a defensive gesture. They slowly circled together attempting to match his angle of attack.

One of the men wielded a net for a weapon. It was tied to his wrist by a filament of line. He flicked his wrist, sending the net up and out in an attempt to snare the attacking monstrosity. As he did so he bent slightly away from and below the man behind him. Taking advantage of the momentary gap in defense, the creature darted in and bit into the bronzed back of the exposed warrior. The man screamed. He fell where he stood. The man with the net now stood alone. In his hand was a weapon the creature knew as intimately as it knew itself. Abruptly, the creature stopped its attack in mid air and settled meekly to the ground in front of its adversary.

A smile of victory and relief spread across the warrior's face. With practiced ease he sent the net up and over the creature. The net landed, constricting around its prey. The man grunted in satisfaction. He removed his mask. A hideous animal grinned back at him from within the confines of the net. Saliva dripped from its yellowed fangs. Despite the alien animals strength, agility and cleverness it was no match for him after all. He would enjoy killing it. The man began to chant. The net constricted tighter and tighter, seeming to feed on the creature as it did so.

Something was wrong. A terrible, burning sensation started around the wrist of the victorious warrior where the net was attached to him. He tried to loosen it through song. The line cut deeper into his wrist. The net refused to respond. He felt as if an alien entity was now beginning to feed on him from the inside out. He began to choke. Acrid sweat seeped out of his body. His consciousness was leaving him, transferring into the hideous creature that stared knowingly up at him from inside the net.

Someone or something was laughing maliciously at him from deep inside his own body as if he were being mentally evicted and transferred into the abominable creature he thought he had ensnared. Just as suddenly the process stopped. It seemed to reverse itself. His own strength pulsed inside himself again as he picked up a long knife found lying beside his comrade and stabbed the creature over and over again.

The creature appeared to be dead. He stared at it in disgust. Removing the line from his wrist, he now turned his attention to his comrades. Freeing them of their masks he found they remained fully conscious but could not raise themselves. A renewed look of terror appeared on one of faces of the men. The victorious warrior turned away from his immobile comrades. What he witnessed made him scream. he threw himself to the ground in abject terror. There was no defense physical or mental that could now save him. From the obscene mouth of the defeated bat a blue fog issued.

It formed into the shape of a man over eight feet tall. His blue body was amazingly well proportioned. Attached to the upper part of his muscled shoulders were not two but four arms. One of them had the net in its hand which it cast over the body of the last remaining guard. The net tightened until no escape was possible. Now trapped by his own weapon, the once victorious warrior tried to avert his gaze but was transfixed by the very evil that held him. Circling the waist of the blue figure was a girdle of human arms ending in twisting hands that continued to open and close. At its feet crawled and slithered the filth of snakes, cockroaches and other nameless creatures whose form it had once taken and was prepared to do so again. It wore a necklace of human heads. Their eyes blinked a tortured, awful awareness.

The face of the blue giant was amazingly calm and classically well proportioned. Brown lustrous hair streaked with black cascaded from his head, falling to just above his ankles. His walk was a hypnotic dance as he approached each of the paralyzed men. Effortlessly he ripped the head from the mans body while the man was still conscious. The monster then joined the head to those comprising his necklace.

He then approached his next victim. With a blade picked up from the ground, he carefully circled it against the top half of the immobilized warrior's skull. The skull opened like a ripe avocado. With seeming insouciance, the blue apparition curled one of his fingers and scooped out portions of the living brain which it tasted as if it were a delicacy. Bending over the third warrior he tore the mans spasming arms off and attached them to his waist.

There was no hurry to his movements. The monstrosities inflicted took time and precise, experienced control. Spurting blood erupted like an unholy fountain drenching the ground. It landed everywhere but refused to pollute the body responsible for the insane carnage. That body for all its unholy activities remained unblemished, even beautiful in the personification of its evil. Over an hour had passed. The one remaining bound warrior had been forced to witness it all. It was now his turn.

Removing the net, the blue avatar of destruction raised his shocked victim gently to a sitting position. The eyes of both perpetrator and victim met. The helpless captive was enthralled by a will a hundred times stronger then his own. He could see in the remarkably beautiful blue eyes boring into his own neither hate, perversion nor guilt. There was a curiosity in them, a loneliness but no compassion, humanity nor any other emotion he could understand or comprehend.

While a blue hand held him steady, the others poked and prodded, looking for any sign of physical weakness or injury. Finding none, the giant slowly nodded his head up and down in a sign of affirmation. Unable to help himself as his own tears fell streaming down his face, the last warrior nodded as well. This was the sign the giant had been hoping for. He brought his large tongue out of his mouth and tasted the doomed man's salty tears as if they were an offering. Their eyes locked once more as the fiend breathed into the sobbing warriors mouth a blue mist and the giant seemed to evaporate inside the body of his victim.

The single survivor raised himself from the forest floor. He was now merely the vessel for another. He looked around at the sickening carnage with no trace of emotion. The net was once again his. It had been surrendered back into his control. Along with the net other things were gained as well. For all the warrior once knew he now knew as well. He thought that Ian had escaped him. This was not the case. The boy did not know what he held inside of him. A female by the name of Tyiea was here as well. It would not be by force that he would gain back from them what had been his. It would be by guile. His sister though weak was still somehow protecting them. He would find them all and when he did he would joy in the process of ripping from them their very souls.

Stay tuned for the next chapter