Brant Danay's Blog

As the universe slowly dies, all demonkind is at war in a tournament of genocide, for the nirvanic afterlife of the Jh'a'vyraa shall only be attained by the single remaining entity or pair of soulmates to survive the cosmos-spanning battles at the edge of time. Chariah, a death-addicted Necrodelic who smokes the flesh of his victims as a drug from a giant, blood-filled bong, and traverses the galaxies in a bestial spaceship, is determined to win this mysterious salvation for himself and his lover, the omnisentient Mother Chaos. Chariah's destiny has become entangled with that of the Oneirophage, a dream-devouring, two-penised were-serpent who hunts by day as Morpheus Rex and imbibes the dreams of his prey at night in his prism palace, Phantasmagorika. The two engage in an epic clash on the planet Grystiawa, but in a universe populated by genocidal demons they soon find their vendetta encompassed by a series of greater wars, cataclysmic combats in which they will encounter the self-fornicating Siamese twin incubus and succubus Tantradox, the brain-raping nightmare fetishist Democubus, the nymphomaniac arachnid queen Spidratha, the labyrinthine snake lord Serpentikal, the ophidian virago Constrictress, the gargantuan insectoid mistress of amber and opium Pestilentia, and a myriad of other abominations and monstrosities. Observing the apocalyptic carnage all the while is Satan himself, watching voyeuristically from the very Hell in which all who fail to become the Jh'a'vyraa will be damned to eternal torment. Who will emerge triumphant from this cosmic armageddon? And what awaits the victor beyond the blood-drenched end of time? The battle begins in Demonmachy.

Twisting Satanic mythologies and Eastern religions into an ultraviolent, grotesque, psychotropic, pornographic, eschatological nightmare, the barbed poetry of the Messiah of Death Saga will rip your eyeballs out of your skull. Addicted to its psychedelic darkness, you'll immediately sew and screw and staple and weld them back into their sockets so you can read more. A relentless downward spiral of annihilation and extinctions, intertwined with pervading themes of spiritual evolution through evil, existentialism versus love, Nietzschean Buddhism, and the true nature of omnipotence, it's an intergalactic, interdimensional harrowing that you'll never forget...and may never recover from.

The blood in the giant bong bubbled and swirled, emitting a sweet-smelling steam as it heated throughout the labyrinths of the monstrous Satanic pipe. A furnace the size of a torture chamber, an altar of sacrifice the size of a temple, an incinerator the size of a crematorium, the Bloodbong nearly consumed the capacious inner sanctum of meditation which housed it. Hells within hells within hells, like the universe itself.
The Bloodbong's endless mazes of tubes and chambers were woven into hypnotic patterns and mandalas, flowing endlessly into and unto themselves while filling its hollow, translucent effigies, caryatids, and telamones with hot vermillion plasma. Twisted like catacombs and intricate to the point of psychedelia, the sinister device was yet as controlled as a circulatory system, a mechanical tapestry of capillaries, arteries, veins, and organs that pulsed and beat like those of a living creature. Through the transparent, scarlet-fogged, rune-carved glass the blood could be seen pumping back and forth, rushing upwards, cataracting downwards, and swirling in crimson maelstroms, driven by the same powerful necromancies which had spawned the Bloodbong eons ago. Flames churned upwards from the interdimensional portal at its base, burning at light speed through an abyssal, roiling wormhole leading to the underworld, heating the Bloodbong with the very fires of Hell.
The center of the bong was huge and shaped like a living heart, its four contracting and expanding sections filled with a tangled mass of naked, screaming bodies, immersed to their necks in boiling blood. Some of the blood was their own. Some had belonged to their ancestors. Some was the blood of their children. They clawed at the sides of the bong's heart-chamber, their faces contorted into raw-meat animal masks. Nearly the last of the universe's dwindling population, they were not near to being the last of the Necrodelic's own personal supply of flesh. Victims, prisoners, and slaves he had, imprisoned throughout the demonium of his living spaceship. Evil he had. Power he had. What he craved, now, was enlightenment.
Chariah, the Death Addict, the Necrodelic, sat with his legs crossed in the ancient, often lethal, black lotus position, his wrists upon his knees, his thumbs and forefingers joined. Gently, he wrapped his lips around the mouthpiece of the Bloodbong. Chariah inhaled, the deep, slow breath of the succubus. Smoke billowed and filled the chamber, filled his black lungs, his black flesh, his black soul. His jet hair and ebon claws grew longer; his red eyes glowed with a hotter shade of crimson. Veins bulged like black mambas across the chiseled muscles of his caliginous figure. His blood quickened and fevered, as did his gonglike heartbeat, his meditative thoughts, and his sin-laden astrosome.
The bodies in the bong began to disintegrate, their flesh pulling apart and transmogrifying into red-tinged fumes. The thin screens surrounding the nexus of the gargantuan hookah like pericardium drew the fumes into the tubes of the pipe. Chariah exhaled, the deep, slow breath of the incubus. The clouds of smoke suffocating the chamber began to take on mystical formations. Death screams resonated like hideous mantras, then mutated into visible wraiths in rushes of synesthesia.
The Necrodelic smoked his victims alive. His plasmoptic and pyroptic powers now heightened, the Necrodelic gazed through the blood and the smoke as though it were boiling Lethe and crystalline steam. He watched with drugged fascination as the skin of his victims fell to float in the blood of the bong, as chunks of muscle dropped away like the flesh of immolated lepers, as raw gleaming organs were slowly exposed, loosened, and freed, then dissipated into gory flotsam. He watched as bones began to separate, as charred skeletons unhinged, as entire bodies were reduced to wet ash, their fresh ghosts free-falling like his drifting consciousness, and then he himself was floating like the gruesome detritus in his pipe, floating downwards into a grave, the grave of the astral plane, where Mother Chaos awaited, pink flesh beckoning, purple hair streaming on psychic vibrations.
The touch of Mother Chaos was as that of a shadow or an ebony sunset, ephemeral as the blind eye contact of the null-demons which inhabited the black holes littering space. Her mouth and vagina were two of those black holes, it seemed, sucking Chariah's tongue and penis through the pink death that was her flesh, through the limits of love and beyond, to salvation or damnation, nirvana or Hell, their astral sex a microcosm of their apocalyptic spiritual war.
Cursed with omnisentience, Mother Chaos felt all the suffering throughout the universe simultaneously, as well as all the suffering which had gone before and all the suffering yet to come. The pleasure and pain of every spirit in existence, living or dead, resonated within her omnisentient astral body, an infinity of torments which only the love of her demon devotee could assuage.
The Necrodelic pretended he was Satan, his wrathful and ultimate master, as he made love to Mother Chaos. He could feel Satan watching as they writhed through time; he was Satan, now, horns bleeding, veins and arteries wrapped in an interdimensional labyrinth around the exterior of his crimson body, barbed penis leaking fiery semen. He breathed omniscience like a drug, sighed omnipotence an eternity later.
As the Necrodelic and Mother Chaos made love, spirits rocketed through the astral plane from above, the severed souls of those whose bodies Chariah had smoked. They screamed at him as they were drawn inexorably downward.
"...bastard Necrodelic...by bloody karma, Satan will have your soul as well...you will never become the Jh'a'vyraa..."
The white cataract of souls came to a blazing finale as they dropped out of sight, soon to be repossessed by Hell, probably never to be born again, for universal moksha, the terminus of all reincarnation, was imminent. Even now, reincarnation was attained by only the most highly evolved demons, for the gauntlet which preceded it grew more arduous by the moment, in direct relation to the proximity of the end of time and the velocity with which it approached. For most, to die in this age meant an eternity in Hell, their spirits plucked from the endless orbits of their samsaric cycles like planets being devoured by a black hole.
Chariah knew this, and, thinking of such universal armageddon, asked Mother Chaos, "Will I be the Jh'a'vyraa?"
"... you will be the Jh'a'vyraa...my Jh'a'vyraa...together we will escape Satan...and attain the final enlightenment beyond...you shall become the Messiah of Death...and the salvation of the Jh'a'vyraa shall be ours..."
Chariah kissed Mother Chaos and made love to her anew, her long purple nails vibrating along his back, her amethyst wings fluttering. Chariah's astral body quivered as they floated.
"Who is to be my next victim?" Chariah asked of Mother Chaos, his words running like ichor in the pulsating atmosphere.
Mother Chaos kissed Chariah on the forehead, and from her damson lips words came like slow worms, using his astral body as a conduit to embed themselves in his brain.
"...you will seek out Morpheus Rex...the Oneirophage...on the planet Grystiawa...he is a powerful demon with intricate and deadly designs on becoming the Messiah of Death...of attaining the Jh'a'vyraa...the devourer of dreams represents a serious threat to your destiny...his wise and ancient mind contains many dreams which he has ingested over the eons...dreams which you must smoke from his skull...tonight, we sail to Grystiawa, upon this dark jihad..."
The words maggoted through his mind, sensuously massaging and painfully lacerating his optic lobes, creating gory visions of the words' true meanings, and then the womb of Mother Chaos was shrinking, tighter and tighter, squeezing the blood and oxygen from his engorged phallus until it became bruised and disfigured like the throat of a strangled corpse. The Mistress of Entropy pulped his member for several moments before finally constricting her thighs and womb one final time, like a boa constrictor with its prey.
Mother Chaos' erotic quietus, their last act of tantric sadomasochism, brought the Necrodelic to Dark Orgasm, sexual death, his ceremonial gateway back to the physical plane. Blind as a grub, senseless as a corpse, helpless as an embryo, the Necrodelic drifted in an existential cosmos where nothing existed except void and orgasm. The sexual nihilism drained the thoughts from his mind like a sinkhole, then through his unfeeling body to be released with the smoke and the space that he invisibly ejaculated into the vacuum. Visions, dreams, and prophecies took the place of thoughts, only to be forgotten in the moments following their psychic flashpoints, and then the void became the orgasm, the orgasm became the void, and he was floating, floating upwards through a grave, the grave of the astral plane, back to the universe he must rape, back to the races he must slay, back to the smoke-filled, sperm-splattered meditation chamber of the living spaceship, and back to the body he must escape, ascending to the ultimate state of consciousness and freeing the tortured soul of Mother Chaos, his soulmate and guardian angel.
Awakening with newfound evil enlightenments, Chariah exited the meditation chamber through a living door that automatically dilated before him and constricted behind him. Chariah made his way to the womblike cockpit in the center of his bestial spaceship, where hanging forests of umbilical cords writhed and curled as they dangled from the ceiling. Likewise, living jungles of umbilical cords swayed and reached out like tentacles from the floors and walls. Chariah stepped inside, and a pink umbilical cord extended slowly from the ceiling and attached itself, on one plane, to his forehead; on another plane, to his third eye. A hundred more followed, joining their flesh to his with wet sucking noises at a hundred different points, pulling his body in a hundred different directions. The Necrodelic was raised toward the ceiling on umbilical stalactites, while umbilical stalagmites simultaneously fought to drag him back down to the floor. Tautening tentacles from every angle suspended the cruciform demon in midair, where he floated as though upon very slow winds. Through these umbilical cords Chariah connected with the ship's nervous system and telepathically guided it toward the Tyterviax system, where the planet Grystiawa spun and the Oneirophage dined upon feasts of dream.
A pair of telescopic umbilical cords attached themselves to the rims of flesh around the Necrodelic's eye sockets, then stretched and bifurcated throughout the bestial spaceship to the myriad eyeballs scattered across its exterior. These scrying tubes allowed the Necrodelic to observe the universe from deep within his living vessel. He gazed with wonder across the dead and dying galaxies, graveyards of space once teeming with life, now laid to waste by armageddon and extinction. He contemplated the passing cosmos, its vastness as black as his billion lifetimes.
As Chariah navigated the universe, he meditated upon love and death, and throughout the entire journey to the Tyterviax system, and throughout his entire meditation, he was haunted by Satan's blood-red stare, poking like hot torture irons through the myriad planes which separated the two of them, voyeur and demon, father and child.

Grystiawa's sunset was a bloodletting, a bloodletting Morpheus Rex felt in his flesh. Lounging on his vast, rose-colored bed, surrounded by bloodstains and blankets, he watched the sunset through the giant window that comprised the western wall of his bedchamber. Scarlet rays sprayed the firmament as though from a thousand severed carotid arteries. The clouds of evening absorbed the infinite shades of darkling red and hung like blood-soaked bandages across the wounded skies. Crepuscular crimson sunbeams flowed profusely over the planet, as if the jugular veins of Satan himself had been slashed asunder. At the nexus of this ensanguined twilight the red sun Tyterviax beat like a dying heart, sinking deeper and deeper into a lake of its own blood, twitching like the scattered shrapnel of daylight surrounding it as it drowned.
The spill of crimson light from the setting sun was not only reminiscent of a bloodletting, but symbolic of one as well, for it was a harbinger of the violent deaths which were as inherent to the Grystiawan nocturnes as black skies, red moons, and golden starlight. With eyes like flaming prisms Morpheus Rex gazed upon the shadowy, blood-colored wastelands of his realm. Grystiawa was dying in pieces, a little more with each victim he killed. The bloodletting sunset was the signal of temporary safety for those few who had escaped his clutches thus far, those still roaming the crimson deserts, badlands, moors, and mountains outside his castle. It was the signal of doom for the fourteen demons chained against the wall across from his bed. Their final day had ended. Their final night had commenced.
For the devourer of dreams, the sunset was a soulletting, as well. As the day died, so too did his diurnal persona. As Morpheus Rex, the Dreaming Predator, he had stalked the badlands of Grystiawa since dawn, walking with deafening silence, running at blinding speeds, and fighting with mind-numbing ferocity upon the lower body of a bipedal demon. With the thighs of a tiger and the tattoos of a serial killer he had hunted, crippling and subduing his prey with Prismsword, Spectrumhammer, and Rainbowspear, leaving his victims bloodied, wounded, and maimed, but never dead. Dreams were a drug most potent when imbibed from the flesh, blood, and brains of the living. Thus, the sacrificial dreamers never knew death until their slayer had satiated his addiction.
Until such time, their vanquished bodies were stored in the Darkprism, a sable, pentagram-shaped talisman which he wore around his neck while he hunted, a tiny black hole from which neither light nor souls could escape unless summoned. Thusly were his prey and their dreams preserved until he returned home to Phantasmagorika, his mighty, glittering, sparkling castle which had been carved from a single gargantuan prism, an ephemeral oneiromancer's palace which disappeared every evening and reappeared in a different part of Grystiawa every morn.
As the last vermillion rays of sunset laced his bedchamber window like veins and arteries, the diurnal persona of Morpheus Rex began to retreat. The sun and the skies, the clouds and the land, gradually turned black by degrees of crimson. Grystiawa reddened itself into darkness. The pellucid window transformed into stained glass, a multi-colored grotesquery that displayed new images every evening, like some species of sentient artwork perpetually inspired to reinvent itself by a Satanic muse.
The sound of Phantasmagorika's heliotropic gateways closing for the night reverberated and echoed across the planet. They did not close to keep intruders out. They closed to keep victims in. In one silent moment nightfall covered Grystiawa. The soulletting of Morpheus Rex followed within a nanosecond. The flesh between his thighs welded itself together and his legs transformed into the tail of a giant snake. Like a male lamia he hissed and slithered, the alpha naga, a demon from the waist up, a serpent from the waist down.
The change was one of inner metamorphosis as well, a psychic transmutation of self, a nocturnal enlightenment, a spiritual vivisection, a soul transplant. As his brain slowly filled with blood like a living sponge, the bestial psyche of Morpheus Rex was conquered by the demonic psyche of the Oneirophage. Oestrus became sadomasochism; torture and suffering became meditation. Hunger and thirst became vampiric cravings for blood, flesh, and dreams; shamanic cravings for drugs, enlightenment, and power. Totemic religion was conquered by devil worship. Psychedelic synesthesias of blood assailed him from every possible sensory organ. The thrill of the hunt mutated into perversions of evil, fetishes for murder and mass destruction, a lust for apocalypse and eternal damnation. Death was revealed as the ultimate reality, the meaning of life, his raison d'etre. The entire universe was his hunting grounds, and total genocide was vital to his survival.
The nocturnal transformation was complete. Carnivorous beast had evolved into genocidal demon. Morpheus Rex had metamorphosed into the Oneirophage. The familiar, black enlightenments known only by highly evolved demons, powerful deities, and almighty Satan himself permeated his mind, body, and soul for another night.
The last changes were minor, final adaptations of the flesh to the spirit's metamorphosis. Externally, his large, round, kaleidoscopic, prismatic eyes began to glow from within, rather than reflecting and refracting the light around them. Heat-vision gave way to night-vision and dream-vision. Internally, the cravings began. Like a vampire's bloodlust, dreams were the only substance that could sustain his nocturnal flesh and evil soul. He craved dreams, needed dreams, was addicted to dreams like a drug. His brain was starved, throbbing with stabbing hunger pangs, so many hunger pangs that they left him room for only one thought at a time, a single mantra that repeated itself, over and over, inside his pain-wracked mind:
I would die for dreams.
Since appendages often became repositories and escape routes for dreams, the feast of the Oneirophage had to be properly prepared. So, as he did every night, he herded his shackled victims into the Amputator, the gargantuan, imposing, iron limbing machine in the southern wing of the bedchamber. Fourteen prey, Morpheus Rex had captured for him. Fourteen skulls worth of dreams the Oneirophage would eat and drink this night.
With death's own gaze the prism-eyed Oneirophage prepared his prisoners outside the mechanical jaws of the Amputator. The sacrificial demons were laid prostrate upon a lengthy, gem-encrusted surgical table, then bolted down by iron collars that fit around their necks and abdomens. The long adamantium chains that had bound them to the floor, ceiling, walls, and each other were hooked to iron rings 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 gripped the wheel with both hands and slowly turned it, grinding the gears of the mutilation machine. The surgical table bearing the captives lurched and began moving inexorably into the bowels of the Amputator. Four guillotine blades fell simultaneously, followed by the wet thud of four severed limbs striking the floor. The screams of the dismembered demon tore the night air as it was borne further into the sadistic device. As a second demon was dragged beneath the guillotines, the first was conveyed past two walls of open flames that cauterized the wounds on its shoulders and hips, preserving both life and dreams. Finally, at the Amputator's exit, a giant scraping device lifted the limbless body from the table and deposited it in an obsidian cage.
The Oneirophage listened to the severing mechanisms of the Amputator as he operated it. The sound of terrified screams, the smell of naked flesh, and the taste of blood in the air made the Oneirophage's dream-cravings even more intense. His prismatic eyes gleamed with lust and his three forked tongues licked his dripping fangs and rainbow lips. His chiseled, bulky muscles stood out against his skin as he toiled, bringing the tattoos which covered his entire body to life. Death's heads and demon faces smiled and snarled, incubi and succubi copulated and battled, torture devices shifted and churned and excruciated their victims. A thousand images writhed as the sinews beneath them moved, tinged with the pale blood the Oneirophage sweated as he operated the Amputator. His tattooed lips shimmered like banded coral snakes. Incarnadine 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 gathered up his dismembered prey, grabbing handfuls of hair and fistfuls of genitals and tossing the amputees onto his roseate, gore-stained blankets in a pile of flesh. Upon his bedside table, whose legs were caduceus staffs and whose surface was engraved with arabesque, serpentine bas-reliefs, and whose wood was so splotched and stained with vermillion that it seemed the table had been carved from a giant piece of driftwood fished from a river of blood, lay the Umbilicus. A hollow, strawlike wand, capable of infinite permutations and rhabdomancies, the Umbilicus performed a myriad of surgical and sorcerous functions for the Oneirophage. Reaching between the prism goblets and chalices scattered across the table, he grabbed the Umbilicus and held it to his lips.
Gripping the Umbilicus with his manicured right hand, each long fingernail painted with 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, 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 shoved 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, slamming 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, then inserted two of the tube's tips into 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 raped a pink-skinned virgin succubus with the Umbilicus, plunging it into her vagina, perforating her hymen with a spray of blood, and lodging it deep inside her womb. Pretending the pink demoness was Mother Chaos, the Oneirophage breathed in sexual fantasies and sadomasochistic phobias. The Oneirophage dreamt that his two penises were ejaculating pink, perfumed semen. Not yet satisfied, he stabbed the straw into the urethra of a purple-scaled incubus and shoved it all the way back to his diaphragm. He performed fellacio upon the Umbilicus, sucking all the sperm and blood from the incubus' testicles, then all the wet dreams and erotic nightmares from his brain, a mixture which influenced the Oneirophage's thoughts 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, the Messiah of Death, and 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, and he knew that he would soon meet the Death Addict in battle. He watched the Omnibeast soar through space, then peered inside the Omnibeast and observed the Necrodelic himself. The flesh-smoker was breathing death from his Bloodbong. The Oneirophage gazed across his black form, his chiseled muscles, his vaguely catlike features, his tapering face, his vampire fangs, his slanted crimson eyes that glowed like tilted abacinating irons, his hair that cascaded in an Acheronic cataract down his back and nearly touched the floor while he sat in the black lotus position. 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 the Death Addict's black brain. The dreams were memories of past slaughters and prophecies of massacres to come. The Oneirophage observed the flesh-smoker's fighting methods through his dreams of war, noting his tendencies, his strengths, his weaknesses. He saw that the Necrodelic received his powers from death itself.
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 maroon 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 the prey that 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, and space continued to grow blacker and blacker with evil and death. Elsewhere, somewhere, or perhaps nowhere, beyond everything Satan had ever created, salvation awaited the conqueror of the universe, for the last entity or pair of soulmates left alive at the end of time would become the Jh'a'vyraa and attain infinite peace. Every other soul in existence would be tortured 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 excised 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 that stretched 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.
He awakened in a mass grave, the carnage of the Oneirophage's nocturnal rituals strewn across the bed. A cannibal's breakfast surrounded him, and he nourished himself with raw demon meat, tearing chunks of flesh apart with his sabretoothed cobra fangs, swallowing inner organs whole with his anaconda 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.
Fully awake, his instincts razor-bladed and saw-edged for the hunt, Morpheus Rex tossed back his long, prism-plaited hair, placed the Darkprism around his neck, and inserted the Umbilicus in a tiny sheath of flesh carved in his wrist. He exited his bedchamber, which now resembled a golgotha, walked down the hall, and entered his weapons gallery. He removed his Prismsword and Spectrumhammer from their weapons rack and slung his Rainbowspear over his shoulder, then left the room and descended the sparkling stairways of his palace to the bottom story. With rainbows carving the air up 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 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 brain-destroying 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 across his bulky, bulging muscles, Morpheus Rex let ring his piercing battle cry.
The hunt had begun.

The Necrodelic's bestial spaceship skimmed the crimson cumulus of Grystiawa's 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 bodies visible through the layers of mist like ticks nestled in flesh, or spiders gestating in translucent egg sacs.
The nearly tangible nature of the spaceship's 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 into the clouds, across the scab-like deserts, and onto the maroon mountain ranges. With the deliberate slowness of a predator, the bestial spaceship circled closer and closer to the surface, until the creatures fleeing across the wastelands could make out its sinister features with their naked eyes.
The hideous vessel seemed 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. Large, triangular dragon scales protruded from 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, open-mouthed nightworms with 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 flowing seamlessly into the hundreds of umbilical cords that were ubiquitous throughout the ship. Those umbilical cords controlled the Omnibeast like the multi-tipped whips of a hecatoncheire dominatrix. They looped, mazed, slithered, 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 tubes, and through them he controlled the nervous system, circulatory system, digestive system, endocrine 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 Omnibeast's consciousness. They were the chains of the dungeonkeeper, the reins of the dragonrider, the whips of the beastmaster. They were lifelines in the grip of the Necrodelic, and through them Chariah possessed the Omnibeast in much the same way he often possessed the minds, the flesh, and the souls of the innocent and the damned. Through the umbilical cords, 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 Omnibeast's carapace like turrets were the eight Hydratowers, rearing back on hundred-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, the vessel's landing gear. The Omnibeast also possessed four giant, living figureheads: the Overdragon, Scythetooth, War Mantis, and Darkworm. Each behemoth 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 head extended from a long, thick neck, adorned by plates and spikes, that seemed perpetually arisen for battle. Above its crimson eyes and crocodilian snout the horns of Satan crackled with black electricity, sometimes oozing 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. It had been conquered by the Necrodelic in an ancient, bygone age, and after the Necrodelic had genocided its species, he had made the Overdragon 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 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 singed and smoking ground. Deserts of maroon sand transformed into plains of black glass as the Overdragon scorched 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 sooty clouds of oily smoke, transported to the chamber directly from the killing fields 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 the pleasant sensation of necrodelia. Though far less powerful than smoking flesh from the Bloodbong, it nonetheless heightened his senses, sharpened his instincts, and created a 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 flaming meteors to the ground. Others the Omnibeast swallowed whole. Mountaintops whizzed by and the Overdragon assailed them with barrages of Hellfire. Giant black tentacles reached out from the Omnibeast 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 veins and arteries into Chariah's dungeons.
Once past the mountain range, Chariah directed the spaceship east, and momentarily glimpsed the flashing colors of Morpheus Rex's Prismsword. Chariah could smell the dreams of his enemy from afar, and as he breathed in their mixture of perfume and decay, the Oneirophage's dreams from the previous night played like reveries in his brain. His mind's eye watched the Oneirophage metamorphose into Satan and swim through an ocean of blood where mermaids played and a beating heart the size of a planet churned the waters with a hypnotic rhythm. Chariah hissed as he observed the Oneirophage divining from the oracle of his own exposed brain, with a sensation that was like being in an interdimensional labyrinth of broken mirrors. He snarled and flexed his claws as he observed the Oneirophage's desire for Mother Chaos, and the wet dreams wherein the dream-eater raped Chariah's soulmate.
Detaching himself from the umbilical cords as the Omnibeast landed, Chariah left the cockpit and made his way through the labyrinth of his vessel. A few minutes later, the jaws of the Overdragon opened, its fangs raised like a portcullis, and the Necrodelic emerged from its corridor-like throat to stand within its dripping maw, his long, black hair streaming behind him, surrounded by clouds of sulfurous smoke.
"Drakhus," he spoke. The dragon's tongue elongated and lowered its master to the ground several hundred feet below.
The Necrodelic stood as dark, as silent, and as still as outer space, making his descent with stoic evil. His black mane billowed behind him, fluttering and floating on the downward breezes. As he stepped onto the surface of Grystiawa, the soul of the planet shuddered like a submissive bitch. With Hell in his eyes, Chariah gazed across the blood-red badlands, his enlightened demonsight drinking in every detail of the new battlefield for thousands of miles around.
The Necrodelic focused his crimson eyes upon his prey. His demonsight isolated Morpheus Rex several miles in the distance, hunting beyond the horizon, stalking the badlands adjacent to a mountain range. Chariah watched as Morpheus Rex battled, subdued, and captured a Grystiawan demon. He observed the Dreaming Predator's strengths and weaknesses, his fighting techniques and tendencies, his massive muscles and psychedelic tattoos. For one eternal moment, the Necrodelic spied upon Morpheus Rex the same way Satan spied upon the universe: from beyond. Then, in one timeless instant, from miles away, the Necrodelic gazed directly into Morpheus Rex's eyes.
The Dreaming Predator felt the Necrodelic's flaming eye contact before he saw it. It was like being telepathically abacinated. When he raised his eyes to meet the Necrodelic's, two infrared beams formed across the wastelands, locking the warriors together with eye contact as tangible as fire, eye contact that pierced like branding irons, the eye contact of bellipotent demons destined to do battle since the beginning of time.
The infrared eye contact drew the Necrodelic across the vast expanses of desert to combat Morpheus Rex. Chariah could no more unlock his gaze than he could gouge his own eyeballs out. Morpheus Rex's eyes had likewise been impaled, as surely as if incandescent spikes had been driven through them and then drilled through his entire brain, emerging from the back of his skull and pinning his head to a wall of brimstone. With hot blood running down his face, he watched the Necrodelic come. The infrared beams grew shorter as the Necrodelic approached. Chariah strode with the purpose of a panther, then came to a catlike stop a mere foot from his prey. His black claws glinted, his dark muscles rippled. They were his only weapons, but they were among the deadliest in the universe. His only armor was his skin, his chiseled physique, his healing powers, and his immense capacity for physical damage. The Necrodelic fought naked, for he was practically immortal, and his threshold for pain was nearly indomitable. His sorceries were as deadly as his claws, and as cruel as Satan himself. An infinity of necromantic spells were stored within his charred brain and scorched soul. The flesh-smoking demon palpably radiated death.
Morpheus Rex raised his Prismsword and Spectrumhammer, reflecting the infrared eye contact across the badlands like the veins and arteries of Grystiawa's sunsets. Morpheus Rex gazed upon the Necrodelic with bloody-rimmed eyes, thousands of colors flashing inside them every second, like prisms spinning beneath a solar flare.
"I've been dreaming of you," hissed Morpheus Rex, his voice the susurrus of a serpent, his three forked tongues flickering in and out of his mouth. "I've been dreaming of you every night. I've been dreaming of you making love to Mother Chaos. Dreaming of your extinctions of entire species, your genocides of entire races, your detonations of entire solar systems. I've been dreaming of your Bloodbong, your Omnibeast, your necromancies. Soon, I will be eating your dreams and drinking your blood. Soon, I will be haunted by your ghost in my bedchambers. When I sleep, I will dream your dreams, grow wet with your fantasies, and scream from your nightmares. After tonight, Necrodelic, you shall dream nevermore."
Chariah watched Morpheus Rex's three forked tongues slither back and forth. They darted in and out of his rainbow lips while he spoke in the sibilant language of serpentkind. Morpheus Rex rose up and swayed like a cobra while he talked of dreams and threatened death. Like a cobra he paused, and then, like a cobra, he struck, Prismsword curving through the air in a rainbow arch aimed for the Necrodelic's neck.
Sparks flew as Chariah deflected the blow, and then, with razor-sharp claws pressed against razor-sharp blade, Chariah leaned in close to Morpheus Rex's face, bared his fangs, and snarled, "You'll be dreaming in Hell tonight."
Their eye contact materialized again, redder and hotter than before. Morpheus Rex's eyes were welded to the Necrodelic's stare like cauterized flesh. His eyelids were immoveable, adhered like roasted skin to lenses and sockets alike. Sparks filled the air between the two demons, and then the fires of Hell came roaring through Chariah's soul, through his incandescent eyes which had been forged in those very fires, and the space between Morpheus Rex and him exploded.
Flames reached a thousand feet into the skies, thunder shook the ground and air, and the explosion of Hellfire threw the Dreaming Predator a mile into the distance. Chariah stood peacefully amidst the roaring fire and black smoke, calm and serene in his natural habitat, a pleasant rush of pyromania flowing through his body.
The same glowing eyes which had brought Hellfire to Grystiawa watched Morpheus Rex blow backwards through the red-hot air and into the distant wastelands. Seconds later, Morpheus Rex landed on his feet in a battle stance, holding the Prismsword at a diagonal angle and the Spectrumhammer over his head. Chariah did not hesitate, but charged at once from the wall of fire. One demonic leap landed him nearly atop the stunned Morpheus Rex, but he came down with the Rainbowspear firmly driven through his thigh. The Necrodelic had barely twisted enough, at the apex of his flight, to avoid being castrated in mid-air by the ensorcelled projectile.
Four sable claws slashed four lines of scarlet across Morpheus Rex's face as the Necrodelic dropped from the skies like a bird of prey. The wounds gushed immediately, leaving Morpheus Rex awash in his own blood. The Necrodelic pulled the Rainbowspear out of his thigh and hurled it over the horizon.
Morpheus Rex licked the blood matting in his prism-plaited beard with his three tongues. As he moved his mouth, Chariah peered through the hole that had been torn in the Dreaming Predator's cheek. Just before it was once again obscured by dripping ichor and hanging flaps of skin, the opening briefly revealed the inside of Morpheus Rex's mouth. Within, the Necrodelic glimpsed the glistening of just-summoned venom on the tips of his fangs, like dripping hypodermic needles connected to syringes of liquid cyanide.
Even though Chariah saw the poison drip from Morpheus Rex's fangs before he opened his mouth, he was barely able to avoid the supersonic cobra strike. Morpheus Rex's fangs closed upon air as Chariah sidestepped his attack. Droplets of venom spattered the sands like raindrops, where they would continue to sizzle for hours afterward.
Chariah backslashed his claws across Morpheus Rex's exposed throat. One claw severed his jugular vein, the other his carotid artery. The third clove his esophagus in half. The fourth ruptured his larynx. The blow would have decapitated a lesser demon. It would have decapitated ten lesser demons, standing in an executioner's row. Morpheus Rex, however, was a highly evolved and enlightened demon, and could not be destroyed so easily.
As Morpheus Rex staggered backwards, blood pouring down his chest from his ruined throat, and jetting outward in streams from his mutilated jugular vein and carotid artery, the Necrodelic leaped towards him, his right arm extended over his head to deliver another blow. Morpheus Rex raised the Prismsword, tilting it towards the sun so that it reflected a multitude of colored beams at the Necrodelic. The strings of color tangled with the demon's long talons, stopping them in mid-air. A second later, Morpheus Rex pulled Chariah towards him with a jerk of the blade. A swinging overhand blow with the Spectrumhammer met the Necrodelic halfway, smashing him in the chest, crushing his sternum, shattering his ribcage, and slamming him to the ground.
Chariah rose with black ribs protruding jaggedly from his side, their ebony edges tipped with crimson. The claws of his right hand were still caught in the rainbow webbing of the Prismsword. He countered by sinking his fangs into the side of Morpheus Rex's skull.
The Dreaming Predator tried to swing the Spectrumhammer again, but their close quarters prevented it. Morpheus Rex unleashed his serpentine powers of hypnosis instead, his prism eyes transforming into kaleidoscopic mandalas that paralyzed Chariah's eyeballs within their very sockets and momentarily halted his every thought process. Within that instant, Morpheus Rex struck, burying his fangs in the Necrodelic's neck, even as the Necrodelic's fangs remained lodged in his own skull.
Venom coursed into the Necrodelic's carotid artery. The poison burned, but the Necrodelic seemed immune to the pain. Its paralyzing chemicals seemed ineffective, as well. Enraged, Morpheus Rex drove his fangs even deeper into the side of Chariah's neck, into his throat, injecting yet more venom into his bloodstream. Chariah swung his right hand, claws still entangled with the Prismsword, in a sweeping arc through the air, forcefully unsheathing Morpheus Rex's fangs from his throat, breaking the rainbow strands of color around his talons, and flinging the Dreaming Predator far into the distance, to land with bonebreaking force amidst the now flickering-out fires of Chariah's pyromancy.
Chariah caught his breath and refocused upon his enemy, prepared to attack again, but Morpheus Rex was already halfway across the desert, and an instant later, had completely disappeared. He raked his demonsight across the planet, but could find no trace of the Dreaming Predator. Neither his sense of smell, his echolocation, nor his psychic powers could determine where Morpheus Rex had gone. He had obviously cast some sort of warding spell with his oneiromancy to prevent the Necrodelic from tracking him.
The Necrodelic's sculpted pectoral muscles heaved up and down as he struggled to breathe with broken ribs. A winged spider briefly attacked him. Chariah slashed his claws in a glittering black blur through the air, and the flying arachnid fell to the ground in four oozing, spasming pieces. Silently, Chariah turned and walked back to his ship. Directly behind him, the crimson sun Tyterviax was setting in a brilliant bloodbath to rival the one it had just witnessed, and Chariah's imposing silhouette stood black as night and deepest outer space before its sanguinary corona. Casting long obsidian shadows which were not quite as dark as his flesh, the Necrodelic strode away from the setting sun, his silhouette growing larger while the red sun behind it grew smaller.
He returned to the Omnibeast, whispered "Drakhus," and rode the Overdragon's tongue back into his lair. Minutes later, the Omnibeast rose into the sky and soared away. The night, which was another of Chariah's natural habitats, had just begun, and so too had his battle with Morpheus Rex, the Oneirophage.