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.