Neath The Shadow of Irakalla Cast Over Mount Sinai

There is a darkness blacker than anything seen by man. So violent, so cruel, so pernicious. Hiding beyond forsaken halls, in the depths of empty long-forgotten rooms, it rests its awful form. Occasionally, unleashing its deadly plagues upon this world in a torturous storm. One day, this darkness decided to latch itself onto me. For no apparent reason, I am just an average joe. I have a steady job with a decent income, a warm home, and a loving wife. My life is as mundane as it gets. Why this evil decided to target me evades my mind. Perhaps it is a result of my closeness and fondness of that wretched husk of a town.

For years I have been traveling to and exploring the decrepit skeleton of what remains of this forgotten hellhole ignored by God and spat upon by his right-hand man, the cruel archangel Samael. The silence of this ghastly, forgotten remnant of human civilization helped me calm my turbulent mind. A ghost town named Whraithsbourg.

Whenever the vortex of thought had gotten too much to handle, I would take a short trip to this personal treasure island of mine. A place of complete solitude in the middle of the barren nothingness. My very own Miklagard. The Great City I always wish to end up in to escape the noise, to escape the pain, to escape… everything…

For the longest time I could do just that, but then one day, I found out the secret to its silence. The reason this old town had been abandoned or rather emptied of its inhabitants. Something devoured them. A thing not of this world it would seem. A gelatinous shining, calling disgusting mass of lights and plasma that sought to hypnotize its prey and then devour it. Integrating it into itself in an unholy union of soullessness and never-ending gluttony. I’ve barely managed to escape the vile thing. Something inside my anxious mind managed to break free from its spell and allow me to run for my life. Countless others weren’t seemingly as lucky.

I haven’t set foot near Whraithsbourg in a while now, not wanting to be devoured by that abominable star-child. Clearly, I assume it’s an alien life form. Not going to my Miklagard meant having to deal with the endless array of voices screaming and shouting inside my skull. Proverbial, of course, I don’t hear actual voices. It’s just flowery language. As part of a way to deal with what was once a maddeningly restless mind, I took up writing. Poetry and short prose of whatever comes to mind. I never did anything with those. I just wrote them to get the thoughts out of my system. Elina, though, would always manage to find diamonds in my verbal piles of rust and put them into various drawings and pictures, or even shirts she sells. My wife is a truly brilliant artist.

I haven’t written in a while, simply because my mind is no longer twisting and turning like two suns locked in a fatal gravitational dance. Now it’s focused on a different kind of anxiety. A constant state of fearing for your life after experiencing prolonged torture. I’m still constantly stressed and restless, but for an entirely different reason. I guess I should start from the beginning.

About a year ago, I finally broke and at the urging of Elina, who knows me better than anyone else, drove again to Whraithsbourg. I just needed that fix of the ghastly calm of this dead paradise of mine. Dreading another encounter with the cat devouring monstrosity, I opted to drive around the town first. Looking around the caves of the town, making sure there was nothing there. This time around, I went during the daytime. That’s the first time I noticed something really strange about the town. It’s like it was on another plane of existence, separate from the rest of its environment. Birds flew around the town only up to a certain point. I must have been looking for some forty-odd minutes at birds fly up to a certain point in the sky before turning back, almost instinctively. They never flew above the town itself, never. I knew nothing lived in Whraithsbourg. That much wasn’t new to me. It took me a while to notice that there was almost a sort of barrier around the skeletal remains of what must’ve been a living center before.

I locked my gaze onto the “Welcome to Whraithsbourg” sign before driving around the ten pathetic houses of the town, and then around the church. I encircled the house of prayer a few times. The memories of my previous visit here replayed themselves in my mind. The cross at the top of the roof seems to have been bent out of shape a little. Maybe someone dared venture into this gateway to hell while I wasn’t brave enough.

The ghastly silence of the place finally broke through to me. It felt like a chilly breeze softly caressing my entire being, making its way through my skin, down my musculature, and further down into my guts. Gently wrapping itself around my heart and lungs – enabling me to breathe freely for the first time in a long time. I became entranced by the beautiful calm and lost track of time. Simply sitting there and breathing deep breaths, a thick fog of majestic nothingness blanketed my mind. I simply sat there and thought of nothing. Just like that, purely nothing.

Until sunset finally came and I found myself sitting in my car under the strangely colored sky of Whraithsbourg. That’s when I headed home.

When I got home and saw Elina, it’s like I fell in love with her for the first time all over again. Not that our relationship has had any issues, it’s just that clearing the system of all the stress must’ve done something to me. The silence must've fixed something inside this body of mine. I felt like an entirely new man. That evening was beautiful, one of my best. The night that followed was terrible, however.

A reoccurring nightmare tormented me again and again. I found myself walking in a purely white endless hall, accompanied by the sounds of a crying woman. I was following the noise. The longer I walked, the louder the crying got. After a while, I came across a kneeling woman. She must’ve been not much younger than me. I approached her as her wallowing became nearly unbearable, drowning out everything else to the point of nearly blinding me with the sound of her crying. Touching her black dress, the crying stopped abruptly; she turned to me, revealing herself to be stained with blood. Her eyes were lifeless and cold like there was no soul behind those orbs of flesh. Two black holes sat in her sockets. They weren’t entirely black or missing. They were normal brown eyes, but they seemed so devoid of emotion, of light, of humanity. It felt wrong. It felt even worse when her scowl turned into a smile. She started laughing like a maniac and then something pushed through her face. Her eyes just pocked and their contents coated my face.

I felt myself waking up, but the feeling of something sticky on my face definitely felt real. I ran my hand across my face, but it was dry. There was nothing there. Uncharacteristically for myself, I just rolled over and fell back asleep. Once out, I once again found myself in the same dream. Same crying, same white hall, same blinding noise, same woman. The abrupt end of crying turned to laughter, burst. Wake up, something over my face… Nothing over my face. Fall asleep again, repeat.

Each time, the dream lasted a little longer, providing a nauseating detail in terms of what happened to the woman. By the time I had a dream before actually waking up, I could see what was the fate of this woman in all of its disgusting detail. Yes, I was having a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream of a dream in a dream.

She laughed, something burst through her, that something was a blood-stained tree. Tree branches simply tore through her body slowly, tearing her apart from the inside with a very sickening sound of tearing flesh and cracking bones. She wouldn’t die, though. Her laughter persisted as the fear ate away at my body. It wouldn’t let me wake until I could see the bloody branches of the tree taking over the entire space. On each branch hung a faceless person impaled. They all screamed and laughed in sync, at a maddening volume. Their blood spilled all over me as they flailed carelessly against the branches that shot themselves through their bodies. It all felt so real, I could feel the warmth of the blood sliding down my skin.

Throughout the entire process, I felt myself getting physically sick and fearful, to the point where my heartbeat became even louder than the demonic noises of the tree. I felt like my body was about to explode, and then I woke up. For a moment or two, I could barely see. Everything spun and a terrible feeling bounced against the walls of my skull. I felt like someone was watching me.

Elina was still fast asleep; it was early in the morning, and I felt like absolute shit. Thankfully, the nightmare was over and didn’t reoccur to me again. Everything was alright for a while until a few days later when I came home. Elina recited a poem to me, one she found on my work desk.

*“Once more reminded of the mind-numbing monotony*

*A monumental expression of nothingness in the face of cold reality*

*Promises of substance and meaning wrapped inside a luminescent*

*cacophony containing the unadulterated void,*

*A contempt for the progression of the ravenous entropy*

*Slowly creeping inside, the realization of absolute banality*

*False promises of meaning that do not exist are mascaraed*

*as the perfection of sincerely brutal minimality*

*Hang a self to the self*

*An honest form of sacrifice*

*Hang a self for the sake of self*

*An elated offering*

*Hang the self of myself*

*on the branches of the tree*

*of forbidden knowledge*

*to be reshaped*

*into obscurity and newly arise*

*I’m longing for the feeling when emotions die*

*When the torment of being can only be molded into an agonized scream*

*following the loss of everything I once held dearest*

*Accepting that existence is merely a hollow dream*

*Defiance in order to hold onto the self-perpetuating lie*

*of luminescence existing inside the dying cosmos*

*amounts to nothing when faced with the senseless*

*apathy of the absurd“*

My skin almost began crawling as she recited that. As she finished, she kissed me and told me it was brilliant. I looked at her like I had seen a ghost.

“I hadn’t written that…” is all I could muster.

“Strange. It’s definitely your handwriting, see?” she said while showing me the note. It was indeed my handwriting. The whole situation got a lot stranger. Thoughts started swirling all over again.

“I… I don’t know… maybe I did and forgot about it… No idea, Hun…” I said, trying to make sense of the mysterious piece of paper that randomly appeared on my desk. I genuinely had no recollection of writing that one, nor does my wife write poetry. Not that I know of.

“Oh well, it’s still lovely. Your memory issue is a bit concerning, but your head is all over the place, anyway.” She almost sang to me.

“Ah yeah, I’m fine…” I said, I lied. At the time I didn’t know I was lying, but that’s how the madness stars usually. Something goes wrong, a tiny bit of the routine puzzle gets misplaced and the constant worrying about nothing returns. It’s a vicious cycle and nothing seems to make it go away. Nothing but the deathlike silence of that one place, my Mecca.

That’s how it began that time, with the strange poem that had written itself. My wife found it, read it to me, and I was genuinely curious at first where did it come from. Curiosity soon became compulsive thought, gaining more and more traction inside my mind until it became a big fish in a small pond. A Mental Megalodon eating away at my psychic mazes. It’s not like I had any answers to the question at hand. I had no fucking clue where the poem had come from. Now I do. I wrote it. Probably in my sleep at the behest of her.

Anyhow, the worrying left me exhausted, restless, and vulnerable to more nocturnal terrors. The days following my wife reciting me the poem, I couldn’t sleep. My inability to make my brain shut up and my experience of very vivid, very lifelike snuff on repeat in my dreams were tearing me apart. My brain placed itself between a rock and a hard place.

One night, I had a dream. I was inside a tiny black room with a single yellow lamp hanging from the ceiling. Before me, I saw four people tied up to crosses. In front of them stood a hooded figure with some sort of knife in hand. I knew what was coming, but the sense of danger was all too real. Yet again, I could feel my body tense up, and my breathing grew shallow and quick. I knew I was safe, but it’s like the dreams forced themselves upon me. Forcing me to watch an execution in public, unable to avert my gaze under the threat of a similar fate.

The hooded figure made a crude cut in the abdomen of one figure who thrashed and struggled against their binds, screaming like a wild animal about to be slaughtered. The screams bounced right off my eardrums. I tried looking away, but my gaze re-shifted itself onto the horrendous act before me. The hooded figure then kneeled and bit at the wound of its poor victim. The bite forced the bound person to shriek and bellow in tones I didn’t know was possible for a human. It then proceeded to suck out a reddish tublike organ straight out of the poor soul’s body. The action caused a disgusting slurping sound that forced my stomach to twist and turn in knots. The four people were screaming like madmen at this point. The noise... it felt so unbearably real and close I just wanted this nightmare to end.

It only got worse from thereon. The hooded figure stood up, the tublike organ, these intestines still stick in its mouth, and repeated the exact same actions on the other three. Making violent and crude cuts in their abdomens before sucking out a portion of their intestines while keeping a hold of the digestive systems of its previous victims between its jaws. That god-awful wet slurping sound drilled itself into my brain. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run, and I wanted this hell to burn out and fade away from my sight.

The hooded figure turned to me and my heart sank, my stomach rolled around itself like a roller coaster and I felt knives pierce my skin. It was that same woman from my tree dream. Same face, four different intestines sticking out of her mouth like a bloody spider web. That’s when I woke up and threw up right by my bed.

I cleaned that quickly before my wife could wake up… God, that awful dream. It felt so real. The fact that this was the same fucking woman… This, of course, sent me spiraling down further. The stress persisted, the restlessness grew fiercer, and the nightmares kept reoccurring. I don’t want to go into detail about the things that have plagued my mind. It’s too much to even reminisce about. At one point, I stopped trying to sleep. I just let my exhaustion do its thing. If I passed out, then I passed out. Obviously, Elina wasn’t too happy about my condition or my lack of will to even talk about it.

Eventually, she broke me out of my silence, and I told her about the crazy nightmares. I told her about the bitch reappearing in my dreams and tormenting me to the best of her ability. Elina surmised it must’ve been a coincidental first dream where my mind made up some figure and later my anxiety made her a reoccurring theme. I didn’t have any better explanation for the mental haunting I was going through, thus I went with it.

We both knew there was no actual way out for me from this stress ridden purgatory. It was only a matter of time until I’d fixated on something else, or just straight up become desensitized to the succubus in my dreams and just forget about her altogether.

That said, the madness only grew worse and drove deeper into the pit. I ended up sick and taking time off from work because of how sleep-deprived, borderline manic I had become. My body was too weak to do anything significant and even so, I was too jittery to stay asleep. I started seeing things like shadows crawling around the house whenever there were none. A static noise was hammering itself into my ears, and I nearly snapped at home. Found myself one second before throwing a vase into the tv. I stopped myself then and stormed out to my car. I knew where I had to go.

Then I drove like a maniac to the only place where I could find some semblance of solace. Whraithsbourg.

I was a raging ball of pure agony and anger when I drove there, but the second I arrived in this place, it all went away. The moment I felt that cold eerie silence - it’s like it washed all the pain, all the anguish, all the noise away. I was on cloud nine again. Everything seemed to turn so mellow and pleasant. The deafening absence of sound felt so welcome and warm. My entire body started feeling heavy. My head became light and my vision turned blurry. I remember little from that point on. Everything kind of faded into the darkness.

I passed out. The soothing silence of Whraithsbourg had pulled a fast one on me again. This time, it didn’t end up with me waking up on the roof of the church. I woke up where I collapsed, sore but well-rested. My awakening was rude and strange once again. This hell of a town refuses to let me have my peace.

I woke up to the sound of frantic knocking and scratching underneath me. It started small and insignificant. Like a sound within a dream. At first, I ignored it, but it kept growing louder and more persistent, and then I realized I was actually slowly waking up. That day, there were no dreams. I was completely out, so this was clearly noticeable. When I finally woke up, I noticed how the sky was colored that same odd tint of blueish purple. The nightly shade made it seem as if the town was older and more dilapidated than it had actually been. The cross on the top of the church seems to have been bent even more. I was about to get up to my feet when the clawing sound coming from beneath me worked its way into my ears. I thought it must’ve been my imagination and got up slowly, but the noise emanated from the ground again. Almost instinctually, I got curious again, pressing my ear against the ground.

For a couple of seconds, there was nothing, merely silence, deathlike silence. Then clawing sound… it got stronger, replaced by the sound of something pounding from beneath. Violent vibration on the ground. Then the clawing resumed. I shivered when I heard a quiet scream echoing underneath me. Looking up and around, I was alone, very alone. Then I pressed my ear against the ground again and I heard that same screaming again. It became frantic, desperate.

My hands started moving on their own, digging, clawing at the ground. My throat was screaming without a command from my brain. I was urging something, or someone, to hang on as my hands tossed and turned the dirt beneath me. I dug until my hands turned bloody, but I had finally hit something solid. Something that wasn’t a rock.

I dug some more until I could see it. A hand awkwardly twisted into a strange angle. The digits were twisted and broken in odd directions, similar to how my mind started spinning. I was trying to come up with an explanation for my morbid discovery, but none came up. The screamed had become louder, almost deafening in contrast to the icy silence of the ghastly town.

Something inside of me snapped, and I started digging around the semi mummified arm like a madman. The longer I dug, the louder the screaming became. Long minutes after my discovery, I saw a leg bent at an odd angle. Soon enough, I could make out words among the wild screams. Whomever this had been, they were still alive. Somehow. I thought at that time that it might’ve been a recently buried person, as in the hours preceding my arrival in Whraithsbourg.

After what felt like an hour of endless digging, I could finally see a face. To my horror, it too was in the wrong placement. Disgustingly wrong. I could make out the skin of the neck folding backward. Something completely twisted the spinal column out of place. I looked at the molested soil below me, attempting my best to ignore the grotesque positioning of the head and the manic screaming coming out of the mouth of this semi mummified man.

I started attempting to reassure him that everything will be fine. I doubt he listened. Since he never stopped screaming like a wounded animal. If I’m being entirely honest, I didn’t believe everything would be fine for him. I doubted he was going to survive much longer after I had found him. His neck was broken and rotated backward. His back was staring at me. The longer I stared, the more it became apparent something broke his body and decimated it in a very deliberate and brutal fashion.

Once I dug enough of this man out, I could no longer hide my disgust. My stomach twisted around itself and the stench of death laced with the smell of moist soil drove me past the point of no return. I turned away and vomited. My mind was racing, my heart was beating like a demon drum in the halls of Leviathan, and my digestive system was attempting to escape through my mouth.

The dying-undead bastard wouldn’t stop shrieking, and my patience ran out. I grabbed him by the head and yelled at him back. Something must’ve awoken in him as he shook his awkwardly folded body, attempting to escape my grasp. I screamed at him to shut the fuck up, and he went dead silent. For a moment, I was at peace again. His body became still, his chest collided with the ground, and his eyes focused on mine. For a single moment, I thought I could calm him down. The next thing I know, he nearly pressed his back to my body and a sharp pain was emanating from my jaw.

Teeth clasped themselves around my lower lip.

The taste of pus definitely helped snap me out of my disbelief. I punched the revenant, and he collapsed to the ground. Spitting and cursing under my breath, I could hear him hollering his madness once more. this time the sounds were fading as everything around me started spinning and my eyes became heavy.

The darkness quickly enveloped me.

When I came to, I wasn’t in my body. My clothes were odd, and my hands didn’t seem like mine. They were too old and too rough to be mine. I found myself standing, peaking through some sort of old wooden door. Beyond the door, there was a hall in which sat a ground of people enjoying a feast. Four men and a woman.

My heart sank when I realized who this woman was. She was the woman that haunted my dreams. My body shook as I assumed that I must’ve been dreaming again. Viewing the world through the eyes of somebody else. I tried pinching myself, but that yielded no results whatsoever. As much as I hate to admit it, I already knew how this one was going to end. The astral succubus wanted to make me suffer another bout of mental torture. My thoughts didn’t really matter at those moments though, because the body I was stuck in was focused on listening to the conversation inside the dining hall.

His ear pressed carefully against the door as to not move it or make a noise.

“It’s so nice to have dinner together again, don’t you think so, kid?” one man spoke, his voice gruff and heavy.

“Indeed, it is, old man,” the woman responded. Judging from what I could gauge, none of the men were particularly old. Maybe she was younger than she appeared, even though she seemed like a fully grown adult.

The other three men began laughing. “Say, Elizabeth, why do you keep referring to Otho as an old man?”

The gruff-sounding man was probably named Otho.

“Because he’s an old man, his beard is graying obviously!” the woman remarked.

“He’s also a giant, but we don’t call him a giant,” another one quipped.

“Well, he is a giant, but he’s an old giant, love,” the woman retorted.

“Hey Fritz, whad’cha made this meat out of, it’s pretty good,” the fourth voice questioned another one.

The man who referred to the woman as Elizabeth then responded, “from the pale man”

“Oh… Haha… Who knew that thing would taste this good?! Did’cha kill it this time?”

“No. Elizabeth wants this freak alive for some reason. Some odd fascination she has with this child breaker. That’s why I keep chopping up parts of it, without killing it. This creature seems to regrow whatever I take from it as long as the head stays in place, anyway.”

“Our little girl is finally becoming a woman! Took interest in a thing that looks at her like a dog in heat… Just a shame it isn’t even human phahahah” Otho jokingly remarked before causing the whole room to laugh.

“Hey, it would be a shame to kill such a destructive animal. It’s pretty intelligent too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it turns the kids it hunts into toys.”

One man started laughing. “This animal is even worse than us. We just kill them. To turn them into toys and kids on top of everything.”

This entire conversation was making me sick to my bones. The body I was in was of a similar opinion as I felt myself shivering and my balance was fading.

“Oh, don’t act like you’re above harming anything, Heinrich. We’ve all seen what you did back home.”

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t turn any children or adults into objects. I just dismember them and maybe feed on their insides…”

I was having trouble breathing. This entire conversation, topped with a cannibalistic dinner setting, was becoming too much for me. I just wanted this nightmare to end.

“Anyway, does anyone have any idea what that thing is, Elizabeth?”

“I can’t say for sure, but it was human at one point, and it’s much older than we are. I didn’t really get the chance to see what’s inside its mind as it is filled with all sorts of violent and sexual memories or thoughts… I don’t even know… It’s definitely not in its right mind anymore. Whatever it may be,” the woman spoke.

“Man-beast sex slave that won’t die easily, here to fulfill every fantasy you might have!” Otho blurted out, causing the whole room to explode into a burst of violent laughter. The man in whose body I was stuck in couldn’t handle the situation anymore, and so he left the scene. His eyes closed and then I found myself in another scenery.

It was daytime, people were leaving the church. The scenery seemed somewhat familiar, almost like Whraithsbourg but still different. We stood in the shade of one building facing the church. The woman was walking out of the church and the man called out to her. His body started shaking violently as she approached him. I could feel his heartbeat rising and his hair standing across his body. He pulled something out from underneath his cloak and his grip on the cold object seemed very unsteady and weak. The woman was right in front of us when he wrapped his arms around her, stabbing her with an old knife.

My mind was going hysteric from the scenery that unfolded in front of me.

The man was losing his mind and kept repeatedly stabbing her in the abdomen. Each attempt seemed more and more frantic. He definitely hit a body. I felt the resistance of flesh. There was an impact; I heard it. It was all real.

She never registered a thing. Merely letting out a long, almost vocalized breath before smiling that god-awful smile she had haunted me with before. I was losing it. This had to end. I wanted out, knowing what was about to come. Fearful of the horrors she was about to unleash. I was screaming inside the man’s head, bashing in his mental walls with my fists. My tantrum yielded no results, as they forced me to watch the terror unfolding before my eyes.

One of her companions emerged from within the wall, taking the form of a living shadow about to strike down her assailant. A mere gesture of her hand stopped her companion. The shadowy figure bore his fangs as she wrapped her arms around our shared shoulders, telling my host she’ll forgive him because she’s fond of holy men. Just this once.

Then she walked off like nothing had happened and we collapsed to the floor, trembling in absolute terror.

The man closed his eyes, and when he opened them once more. We were at a marketplace. The woman stood across from us and a large crowd of onlookers was standing all around us. A butcher stood right behind the woman who seemed mostly amused. The man whose body I invaded was screaming at the top of his lungs. He was accusing the woman of being a witch, a whore of the devil, and other medieval curses. Something in the air was changing, though. There was electricity building up. I could feel it. Something awful was about to commence, and indeed it did.

“I stabbed her…” was all the man managed to let out of his mouth before the butcher’s blade went straight through her and into his side. The feeling of metal cutting through me felt so real. The realization of the man losing his footing accompanied it. We fell even further onto the knife. I was screaming in pure agony inside of his head. It felt all too fucking real for a dream.

The crowd suddenly became dead silent. I could see the jovial emotions in their eyes fading away, being replaced by murderous rage slowly, but evidently. The air became sultry with electricity. Everyone was dead silent, until one child broke the silence, slowly chanting;

*"Neath the shadow of Mount Sinai*

*I watch as the killers swarm*

*at the feet of Milton’s tomb*

*They bow before a ghastly form*

*of a serpent born from a barren womb*

*while the heavens grievously cry*

*Unholy ghost, born of a lie*

*Condemned to death, reborn in fire*

*O Black Seraph unlight my path*

*Thou art eternal, undying*

*Intoxicated, I stand by your stench of death"*

Soon enough, more and more children started chanting all over us. I could hear their voices growing louder, more menacing. They were dull and monotone, yet full of conviction, like a sermon. The air became stifling with each breath becoming more and more toxic to inhale.

The woman’s laughter rang in my ears as she grabbed the man before kissing him. I could feel her lips against mine. They were real, too real. They were real lips, but they were cold, beyond cold. Like touching a dead body. The feeling of the lips of a woman who wasn’t my wife felt wrong. I wanted to get away, but I couldn’t. My body was hurting all over already.

That was just the beginning, though.

The woman grabbed the man’s head, and with a quick motion - she snapped his neck. A terrible pain exploded through my neck. Assured of my impending death. I was screaming and thrashing and pleading and begging for the torment to end. I wanted to wake up.

The road to hell was long for me.

As we fell to the ground and everything seemed to go to shit, more pain came. So much pain, unimaginable amounts of pain. I just laid there and took every last raindrop from the storm of agony and torture they forced me to endure. The townsfolk descended upon us like a pack of hungry wolves tearing into us like a fresh kill. Merciless and unrelenting.

If hell is real, then this is it.

Every uncharted part of my body was beaten, bruised, broken, molested, and punished. No piece of skin was left untouched, no bone was left unbroken. Not a single cell was left unharmed. They left no bodily crevice unassaulted. Everything was stabbed, poked, prodded, cut, and dug into in an orgy of violence and gore.

The whole time, these demonic children kept chanting, almost mockingly.

*"Been bored in silence, my dear old succubus*

*Defile the universe as you rape the sun*

*Beyond countless eons, come forth from the abyss*

*To bring the fall of all gods and man*

*Archangels blow your trumpets to hail her return*

*Santa Sede falls torn apart between black holes*

*Lord of the hosts mourns while the heaven ceaselessly burn*

*Thus, ends the calm before the unending storm*

*Ahead of endless torment, forcing creation to deform*

*Hear the cosmos scream the name of the ghost, signaling all hope is yet again lost"*

I couldn’t do anything other than praying and pray I did. I prayed for the first time in years, and God seems to have not heard me because he never answered. He never delivered me either. Instead, at some point, the pain stopped feeling so bad. In fact, I started feeling really pleasant, a warm, wet pleasant feeling building up on the inside. And a voice, a sweet, sweet voice, was singing to me. Reassuring me that my downward ascend into the ninth circle is almost complete. Finally, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Before I knew it, I became enamored with the agony. Just as I felt at home in all the hell-spawned torment, I was drowning in, it disappeared. It was all gone. Completely gone, erased. I woke up again in Whraithsbourg. The revenant was still there, screaming and hollering like a tortured dog. His ungodly screaming was drilling into my brain. The visions burned in my eyes, the execution of the heretic I had found, cursed into immortality spent as a broken pile of human mess for transgressing against her. Execution by decimation and premortal embalmment.

I felt like I knew who she was, what she was, but I couldn’t get it out of my mouth. For some reason, I couldn’t get the right words out. As I was struggling to form my thoughts, a hand grasped my shoulder.

Looking behind me, I saw her unmatched beauty shining, and hell followed right behind her. She cast a shadow so vast it turned the universe beautifully dark. At that moment, I could finally find the right words to describe her.

Goddess.

She smiled a gentle smile as she heard me utter that word. Looking lovingly deep into my eyes, she asked if the heretic had hurt me. His awful screaming was driving me insane, and I couldn’t even speak right, so I simply nodded. She hugged me tightly. I could feel her love filling me up. I felt as if I was about to ascend straight into heaven. Her deathlike skin felt so warm and welcoming. Unlike anything, I’ve ever felt before. This was the most alive I had ever felt.

She relinquished her hold on me, reassuring me everything will be just fine. Urging me to look at the heretic, she pulled me towards her, resting my head on her lap. I watched as a dark vortex appeared on the ground behind the screaming revenant. Two hands blacker than the darkest of nights appeared out of the vortex and pulled one of his legs into it. The vortex closed right as gravity pulled his leg through it. A disgusting sound of bones breaking and flesh tearing echoed tore through the silence of Whraithsbourg. The heretic cried like a sheep in the slaughterhouse attempting to escape the jaws of death.

I kept on looking at the sysiphically prolonged dismantlement of the semi-living screaming carcass. My goddess caressed my head as we both watched vortex after vortex, appearing to chop away a part of the perpetually suffering hermit. He attempted to crawl away using his head and torso, to no avail. A vortex opened right under him, before closing right as skin passed through it into the realm below.

The explosion of gore and guts tainting the soil of this ghost town was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. An eruption of crimson liquid took the shape of a giant rose beneath the infidel and his guts flew about like detached pedals.

After what seemed an eternity in heaven, his body was reduced to nothing but a mere head. A head that my ghastly goddess has offered to me as a sign of our union that took place in the dead center of the town of the ghost.

I have since introduced my wife to my goddess and while she was reluctant to accept her at first. It took a while, but she has finally come around. Her pleasured screams of hell-bound agony stemming from her initiation into our mystery are now serenading me from our bedroom as I write another hymn to our ghastly mistress. Whose eerie form watches me compose melodies in her honor, approvingly from the darkest corner of my house.

*Let me walk into their cities*

*Where saints’ blood*

*has covered every last trace*

*of remnants of living creation*

*Where the still living corpses*

*drift in crimson mud*

*of death they dream*

*their mouths are open*

*but the pain won’t let them scream*

*Take me back to that beautiful place*

*Eons passed and yet you remain the same*

*Cast your pernicious shadow over the sun*

*Crucify the masses and feed them to the flame*

*My dear enemy, don’t you spare no one*

*Hell will follow*

*where you stand*

*Burn the universe with your ghastly halo*

*Driving creation mad*

*Unhallowed Ghost*

*Let me walk into their cities*

*Where saints’ blood*

*has covered every last trace*

*of remnants of living creation*

*As God mourns*

*with agony stigmatized across his face*

*that which he has lost*

*Blackened spirit*

*That which rose from a life’s cremation*

*Desolate, disembowel and decapitate*

*The serpent will mourn*

*that which you’ve killed*

*and he loved the most*