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The wailing dirge of the damned surged like rolling tides, barely a whisper that skittered under her skin rising, rising, to a deafening roar that ripped at her insides before falling again, to a lull, a melody. It was her first perception here. The wavering cries like a singular entity, rasping, screaming, pleading, crying. She was insensate. Numb. The dirge awoke her perception again and brought her screaming to the surface of consciousness, like all those surrounding her.
Bodies writhed and twisted like the tides of their dirge. Surrounded on all sides, pressed tight and close amongst so many, she suffocated. They all slid against each other wetly, and though her eyes could not see, she could hear their cries and smell them. Blood and sweat and something viscous, thick and oily, coated her.
Flailing, singing with them, curling her hands into claws with which to rend and tear, she struggled against the tides. Without a sense of direction, a sense of anything at all but sheer thrumming terror, she ripped her way through the tides of bodies pulsing around her. Endlessly, screaming herself hoarse and lost, she slipped and squirmed and surged amongst them. Determined.
Air against her skin made the fluid coating her crackle and dry when she surfaced. She hadn’t realized that she’d been squeezing her eyes shut until they tried to open, sealed sticky shut she pulled one hand free of the writhing mass of bodies to claw the crust from her eyelids and see again. She had no idea how long she’d gone without sight, without feeling air against her skin.
It was dim and dark where she was. Floating on a sea of bodies. Those beneath her, around her, flailed and tried to catch at her limbs and pull her back down. They struggled, too, to lift themselves up from this pit. Weary and terrified, she continued to struggle and drag herself over the roiling surface of bodies until she felt something cool and smooth against her hand.
There were limits here after all. Edges. Boundaries. She hadn’t realized there was anything but the pit of bodies until she hit stone. A shore, of sorts. Her broken nails clawed bloody at the jagged surfaces of rock, heaving herself away from the pit. They clung to her and dragged her down, their dirge rising high and panicked, a noise that split her head and made her burn with undefinable rage. With the last gasping desperation of one who can see the end, she fought to pull herself free.
It was difficult to see more than a few feet in front of her. This place shifted and flickered in her vision, as though it did not want to be seen. Sprawled on a rocky ledge, free of the grasping hands and press of bodies around her, she blinked and pushed herself to her knees with shaky limbs. Her body ached and pulsed with burning heat, flesh scraped and flayed, hair matted and her throat raw with the screaming that still bubbled behind her tongue. The shadows of this place flickered around her, down below in the pit from whence she came pale limbs and contorted faces rippled like waves. The tumble of a rock strewn shore rose in front of her. Bewildered and alone, she cast about to understand this place she’d found herself in.
There was a figure down the way, slowly and steadily tottering over the rocks. It was stooped as it’s long clawed hands picked over the rubble on the ground. She laughed when an image flitted briefly through her head of a lovely woman picking shells off a sandy beach while the sun shone and the waves crashed sweetly. Not like this place. Not like this hell.
It looked at her. When her screams curled up on themselves and she laughed, the stooped figure straightened and made a path her way. It was skeletal and horrifying, rotting flesh hanging from it’s frame like tattered rags, an outfit worn too long past use. There were horns curling above it’s head, skull exposed beneath patches of mottled blackened skin. When it smiled, thick smoke seeped from it’s mouth between yellow teeth. It looked at her with eyes as white as gleaming bone and kept her pinned where she knelt under the power of it’s gaze.
Slowly, it made it’s way towards her and reached out with spindly fingers to grasp her face.
It’s voice was sibilant and jagged edged like the rock ledges, rising and falling in tandem with the wailing dirge that surrounded them.
“And what do we have here? Have you made your way out on your own, little thing? Why do you laugh to see me?”
-
It took her far away from the pit of bodies that rolled and crashed against the rocky ledges like some kind of sea. Along winding narrow paths in a pocked landscape that moved around them, rising and falling, ever changing, it took her away. She wondered, vaguely, how one can find a path in a place that never settled. The rough earth pulled skin from muscle as she was dragged along. It held her hair wrapped tight around it’s hand and hauled her like she was nothing. She had no strength to stand, no will, no understanding of the ground that moved beneath them. But it was steady.
It took her to a new place. Where the landscape settled and staid and gave definition. To a room. And the darkness cleared enough to see in there, the gleaming shine of instruments and the desiccated bodies of others which this thing had gathered like so many shells to hoard. They were strewn like toys, some hung from the walls and others strapped to tables, more still piled in the corner like broken cast offs. She was given a place, hanging loosely against the cold slick stone of the wall. She wondered if it was blood that made everything wet. She wondered why she could still bleed, when she had spilled her body again and again and again in the pit till she was hollow and empty. She wondered why she still had more to give.
There were no answers to these questions. Yet she learned many things.
It’s name was Alastair.
It was old and it was powerful.
She wondered if she had a name. None came to mind. She didn’t know how she had come to this place, or why. She didn’t think any reason could exist, nothing could exist here, but suffering. And oh, there were so many ways to suffer, Alastair taught her.
It taught her, at first, what she was by taking away a thing at a time. She learned to exist without a heart. Without intestines. Without arms. Without eye lids. It would take away a thing and leave her hanging against the wall to consider the minutia of the thing via the lack of it’s presence as Alastair went about it’s work with the others. She watched it, as it carved in to them to take away things or to give new things. To teach them. She watched, and she suffered, and she learned.
Sometimes it would teach with it’s absence, sometimes with it’s presence. Alastair had so many things to teach her. It would flay the skin from her bones and pull the screams from her core, it would croon as it reached in to her body and squeezed. It liked to sing as it worked, it’s low lilting voice almost a lullaby if you could hear it beneath the scattered crying of those it worked on.
It never let her grow complacent with the constancy of it’s ministrations, for it had so many ways to make her suffer. After she had hung against the wall for so long, Alastair moved her to a table and took her apart even more viciously, more carelessly. And when it broke her so completely she lost her sense of self and place, it would throw her in the corner with the broken things.
Eventually, the realization would come back to her. That she was a thing. That she was here. That she had things to learn. And her body would close itself up, it would regrow what Alastair took as though it were a garden with so much to offer. There were still times she was too broken to lay upon the table, limbs missing, belly slit open, times she could do nothing but lay in the corner and laugh.
Others came and went. Other bodies to hang upon the wall. Other things like it with strange beetle eyes and twisting horns that ran their hands along her broken body and marveled at it’s work, at it’s teachings. There were hounds which snuffed at the ground and howled, roaming through sometimes on the heels of other it’s and sometimes alone. Every now and then, the place shifted, as though it was hard to maintain it’s form.
There was no sense of time here, moments bleeding together in a constant drone. There was no sleep and no daylight. She had forgotten what those things were. She closed her eyes, when she had eyelids, to seal out this place. But she could never close her ears to the sounds of screams and the wet rend of flesh being torn, of bones being broken. The sounds of this place rose and fell, a steady pulsing that constructed the flow of existence.
-
There was a steady drip, drip, drip of blood splashing on the stone floor as Alastair crooned it’s song and another one of the bodies whimpered and rattled their chains. She could hear it clearly from her spot in the corner, could watch it as Alastair expertly flayed the skin from it’s subject all the way from neck to ankle. Alastair held the tool steady in gaunt hands, with precise small movements like a gentle caress, it parted skin from bone and took. And took. And took.
She would sigh if she had lungs. Her body was open from the cracked splintered jutting of her sternum and ribs down her jagged ripped belly that sunk into the hollow cavity of her body. Alastair taken everything in there today. She lay broken on the floor, head bent and arms limp splayed around her. She watched Alastair work, her body a lovely song of pain and nothingness.
A hound wandered in. She had come to recognize some of them, as they came and went. The mottled ripped patches of their fur and the wrinkled blood soaked pull of their muzzles over sharp rows of teeth, the bright red gleam of their eyes and the clack of their nails on stone. She had come to recognize a few of them, giving them names in her head. She didn’t even have a name. She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t give names to the others who hung on the walls in this place. Only Alastair had a name. And a few of the hounds.
This one, she had named Hunger. His mouth was always open and voracious. He would come and spend time with her, when she was sprawled on the floor broken. He liked to lick at her wounds and tear the flesh from her bones to gnaw on. The sides of his belly were sucked in tight against his ribs, he was a mean one. Insatiable.
Right now, Hunger pattered over to her where she lay split open and empty. He licked against the skin that pulled tight over her shredded ribs and wrenched a rib away from her body to crack in his teeth. She screamed and twitched but didn’t have the capability to move away from him. Alastair glanced their way and smiled as though fond of the scene, as though she were a sweet little girl playing with her puppy.
Hunger snuffled against her, his tongue sandpaper rough as it aggravated all the aches and pains that had dulled to a numb throbbing, bringing them screaming back into the present and lighting her up with it. With a growl, he latched his iron jaws around her arm and wrenched. She howled like a hound as well, when he tugged and sunk his teeth in to her and ripped her arm away.
Content, he circled a few times and curled into a ball on the floor next to her, his mottled patchy fur slick with blood and he snapped at the arm he cradled between his paws, savoring it. She wept and bled and her cries died down to a simpering as she watched him eat her. Alastair had turned it’s back again, to focus on work. Hunger licked at her bloody broken arm and ate happily.
She smiled at him.
If she could move her other arm, she might reach out to feel his rough matted fur and curl herself against him. But she was a broken thing, so she waited on the floor and floated on her suffering as she felt her body knit itself back together, watching the hound with his prize.
-
Alastair seemed disappointed sometimes, though intrigued, when it couldn’t make her scream. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she moaned. The ceaseless tides of pain that swelled and crested and broke, that ebbed and dulled, and surged again, she had become inured. She wasn’t numb to it, by any stretch, no. Alastair could make her body sing with the pain, could pull orchestral masterpieces from the wreckage of her blood and bones. One might say she were resigned. Yet that was incorrect as well.
She was beginning to enjoy it.
Lying broken open with shattered legs and her tongue ripped from her mouth, she swallowed her own thick blood and curled her arms over the hound draped half across her. Alastair was away, perhaps collecting more bodies from the pit.
Claws, she had named this one. He had long curving talons for nails that clacked against the floor and she could hear every time he came and every time he left. He liked to sit at Alastair’s feet when it had her on the rack, to watch. His eyes were bright and curious. Claws had long thin legs that held up it’s soot blackened body looking burnt with patches of raw red sores showing through his fur. He would lick and lick at the wounds until they wept, then he would snap at her own broken body if she were on the floor with him.
His tongue was always lolling from his mouth, trickling drool thickly on the sticky dirty floor. Every now and then, Alastair would stoop to pat his head. Alastair spoke to them sometimes, the hounds. In the sing song cadence of it’s voice, it would hold conversations with the hounds about how best to pull apart a body, where to reach and what to take. She started asking herself those questions. What would hurt the most. If she could reach that point, past the point of no return, if she could shatter. Yet though Alastair pulled and twisted and mangled her, she never staid shattered.
There was no such thing as sleep in this place, but still she drifted. It startled her sometimes, when Alastair spoke to her. It always seemed to talk to itself, or to it’s hounds.
“Are you growing fond of them little thing?”
Back bowed and snapped at a strange angle, she looked up at it’s bleached white eyes and curious smile where it hunched over her.
Claws head was rested on her smooth stomach, all the things broken in her were in the inside today. She blinked at the hound and at it.
Alastair crooned saccharine thick, “I think they are growing fond of you.”
-
Panting like the hound on top of her, she scrabbled her broken nails against the grime on the stone floor and whimpered. Her neck was snapped, bone grating beneath the skin, as Alastair held it’s foot heavy against the back of her neck keeping her pinned. It had power too, to hold her with just a thought, to command her with the flick of a finger. It liked to hold her down with it’s hands though, with it’s weight and presence.
Cheeks pressed to the cool stone, she gasped and floundered. Claws huffed on top of her, his nails raking deep gouges in her hips and his teeth sunk in to her shoulder. She jostled with the hound’s motions as he thrust in to her, wild and erratic.
They were fond of each other.
Crying out, she slid a hand down beneath her body, mangled fingers slipping over bloody torn skin and her intestines were drooping out her stomach in coils from the cut Alastair opened navel to sternum. She could feel the shape of the hounds cock moving inside her, pushing her organs out, breaking her skin and tearing her open.
Flush with the pain and writhing with the pleasure, she dug her fingers into the cut down her belly and pushed her hand inside. It was hot and slippery inside her body, she knew the feel and shape of her insides so well by now.
This was a different sort of violation from the way Alastair pushed hands insider her to pull her apart and make her something new. This was a purposeless intimacy. This was a primal feral thing, something raw and brutal and purely for the wanting of it.
This was for her.
She reveled in it, in the depravity and slick sharp collision of their bodies as the hound broke her open. Digging her hand in to her belly, wet shifting of her body opening and falling apart around her, she felt and grasped for the hound’s cock as it rocked in deep. She could hold him through her own organs, wrap her hand up inside herself and claw at the hound within her.
Her high breathy laugh was laced with the pain that threatened to subsume her but she rode the fine edge of that sharp knowing, body thrumming and spiraling out of control as Alastair crooned it’s own incoherent songs above her and the hound howled behind her. He crowded up closer to her as his cock swelled thick and pulsed hot inside her. She could feel it, through the tears in her body that ripped until she felt the head of it’s cock in her hand and it’s semen gushing wetly down her arm buried inside her own belly.
Seizing with the wash of manic euphoria that burned hot down to her core, she screamed as she clawed herself open and writhed on the hound’s cock.
-
Things were changing.
She was changing.
She had watched tendrils of black smoke curl and dissipate along the stone floor of this place for a while. She had watched the smoke linger on her skin and felt the brush of it warmly against her lips. It was like the smoke that seeped from Alastair’s mouth when it smiled at her, but it was not. She had thought that the smoke had sunk in to Alastair, that it had found it’s home inside from without.
Yet as she watched, she discovered. The smoke did not move inside her. It bled from within her. Delicate tendrils and wisps of barely visible smoke rose from her wounds when Alastair opened her and remade her, again, and again, and again. The smoke swelled within her, warm and pleasant, it suffused her body with a strange power that sunk into her and made her yearn. The smoke thickened and darkened as she considered it, cradled it in her palms and nourished it.
Her perception shifted, in infinitesimal tilts too small to notice until the place around her sharpened into focus. It was like a second sight, a revelation, to see through new eyes the beauty of the rot that surrounded her. The flesh that fell singed and torn from her body and the gleam of her bone fascinated her. She picked at her body when Alistair left hands that could take hold and tear.
She grew scars and scales, felt the bump of horns protruding from her forehead, shuddered with the roil of smoke that shifted inside her. She was becoming. She was a thing of Alastair’s making, molded by it’s ministrations and hardened.
Quivering with spent exhaustion on the table she was stretched upon, she blinked and focused on the tipping of her perception into something other when Alastair cupped her face in those cruel hands and pulled her eyelids up with thumbs to pin her eyes open and wide.
“Ah, how lovely. Black suits you my dear.”
-
Others came and went in this place where Alastair kept her. Others like it, powerful things, with mangled faces and smoke between their teeth and great horns spiraling from their heads. Hounds that she knew well and whistled to come closer, to keep her company in this dread place. Bodies from the pit with eyes rolling back and broken limbs.
No one spoke to her but Alistair, no one touched her anymore but it or the hounds. She was a thing in here, to be made. To be used. She belonged to it.
Comprehension was slow to dawn on her, when another placed hands upon her and smiled as though benevolent with sharp teeth. Fevered yellow eyes shone as the regarded her, charred skin crackled and peeling around it’s face as it licked it’s lips and scraped it’s nails down her scarred body.
“Have you made another for me, Alastair?”
Alastair hovered over it’s shoulder, a proud grin upon it’s face and it’s voice that slithering lilt as it spoke, “I do believe so, fine work if I may say so myself. You’ll like this one. She’s got spirit.”
The power behind those yellow eyes bored in to her and she was pinned to the wall with a pressure that seared down to the core of her bones.
It tapped her forehead. “Your horns are coming in nicely.”
She stared, mouth agape, mind whirring in an attempt to comprehend this interaction.
“Do you have a name?” She asked.
Her voice was hoarse from disuse, only made for screaming since she could remember coming to consciousness in the pit.
It’s wicked yellow eyes shone as thin lips parted and it smiled at her. “My name is Azazel. Do you remember your own name, child?”
She opened her mouth to answer but there was no name on her lips. It was lost to her long ago. In all her reflection, she hadn’t found it again. “No.”
It extended a hand to her, brushing a lock of hair dreaded with blood and viscera behind her ear. “Alastair has shown you what you are. Come with me, and I will show you who you are. I will give you purpose.”
It’s smile was a benevolent thing before it withdrew and turned it’s back to her. She was pressed against the wall with a power she could only see when she looked with her second sight, but Alastair held her tight there as Azazel stepped away. She pushed against it, called upon the dizzying surge of the smoke that simmered within her and she pushed back against the smothering of Alastair’s power.
She felt her feet hit the floor as she dropped from the wall, and Alastair hummed before turning away. Quickly she followed in Azazel’s path. It led her from this room, this place she’d known so long in to the beyond, where everything shifted around them again.
She heard the click click of sharp nails on stone behind her, the swish of a hound’s tail. Claws was following close on her heels, his breath hot against her calves. She smiled, that the hound would choose her. Alastair’s laugh resounded behind them, warping as the landscape shifted, growing hollow and distant.
Though the ground moved beneath her feet, she held her own and kept stride with Azazel.
She did not have a name, but she did not need one. Her identity was shaping and solidifying within her, a thing with edges and depths that she could know, a thing of her own making. She did not have a name, but she knew what she was.
She was damned and she was saved.
She was born again.