I find myself falling still as the ground fast approaches. I brace myself, bringing my arms up to my face but still my arms break as I crash to the ground below. My shoulder is next as I roll onto the hard ground and I can sense my hip follow suit.
The pain is intense, nothing has gone numb, each crack in bone is acute, every cut, every scrape. Even more acute is the intense burning sensation which follows not long after. After what was like hours of pain, I could stand. I looked to my hands, soot covering them, the air was thick with sulfur and earth. Ash fell like fresh snow everywhere I looked. I blink fresh ash from my eyes I spot the Succubus gliding down in front of me, she lands a good twenty feet from where I am, her lithe hooves clopping to the ground.
She turns her wings folding behind her, one hoof before the other, sauntering towards me with a sway in her hips, her tail countering each cocked hip. “Welcome…” she says, motioning on either side of her with her hands, “to my humble home,” she looks over her shoulder, “Well, the outskirts.”
My hands pat at my robes, searching for my tools or anything other than the clothing on my back, I find nothing.
“Ah, that’s a shame. Your holy water and crosses didn’t come with you?” She stops a few feet in front of me, leaning down to match my gaze, “Don’t even have that Amber shit, huh?” raising one hand up she continues, “now you know how I felt. Allow me, Father, to collect my things.” in her hand appears a whip, though unlike any I had ever laid my eyes on.
The handle is black and tarnished steel, while the length of the whip looks more like a segment of multiple blades, dispersed between each segment are large barbs. “My babies are coming soon.” I spot two black clouds of ash blasting towards her. The first ash cloud smacks against her back, wrapping around her chest, arms, neck and covering her wings. Her upper body clad in a heavy looking black plate armor, with green jewels on each of her shoulders. Even her neck appears armored, the plating seeming to blend into the flesh of her cheeks. The jewels on her pauldrons look almost like eyes, and I can even spot the shadows of iris’s glaring back and forth. The second ash cloud collides with her rear, wrapping around her hips and down her legs, even swirling around her tail. As the ash dissipates it clothes her legs in even heavier armor, her hooves even covered in a layer of black metal. Her tail now looks similar to her whip, with the tip acting as a blade itself. A pair of green jewels now adorn either side of her shapely hips, I can see the same frantic iris’s within.
Now armored, she sauntered over “If I was summoned with my babies, Father, I’d have opened the gate in about five whole minutes.” her wings spread, the grinding of metal on metal pierces my ears as she now floats, her feet inches from the ground. In an instant, she’s several hundred feet in the air, and then in another, she is behind me.
The bite of her whip strikes across my back, a deep wound being made, I fall to my knees from the shock.
“You know Father, it’s not the constant pain down here that sucks so much. It’s the healing part…” she moves in front of me, her metal clad wings making a nails-on-chalkboard sound as she closes them. “That’s the real bitch.”
I groan as the wound on my back seers in pain, “Why?” The grip of her whip against my chin forces me to face her.
“Because you sent me back here. You sent me back here after I escaped and I am fucking furious,” she growls at me, slapping the handle of the whip across my face.
Blood drip down my cheek and over my chin.
“You know what these are all made of? My babies?” she taunts.
“Somehow I feel you’ll tell me regardless,” I respond, doing my best to not focus on the pain in my back and face.
“These were souls,” she boasts, emphasizing her armor and weapons. “Three souls, one in my lovely whip, one lucky bastard gets strapped to my tits, and the other gets the pleasure of caressing my beautiful hips…” she smiles “and more.” She brings the handle of her whip to her now black plush lips in thought, “though maybe if he’s wired like you he’s not too pleased about it.”
I Stagger back to my feet I’m rewarded with a slice to my shoulder, sending me back to my knees.
“You don’t get permission to stand. Here I’m your God.” the Succubus now places a heavy hoof on my back. “In fact,” she presses on my back, sending me flat on my face, “Kneeling is too good for you, worm.”
My face in the ash and dust, coughing as my nose and throat burn from in irritation as I inhale.
“Hm, you know folks pay good money for this treatment.” the Succubus snickers. “You’re my bitch until that choir boy pulls your soul out of here and considering how green he is you might be here for a hot minute.” She giggles to herself, “Hot minute... oh Sara…”
Gasping I manage a question, “Why make me suffer?”
Her hoof grinds into my back as she explains, “Because all I wanted was to be with my family, and then you all had to fuck it up.”
Yet more ash and dust choke me as I explain, “We did nothing… it was you who brought ruin to your family.”
She removes her hoof from my back and soon finds itself in my gut. I sail through the air, landing on the hard ground. She was nowhere near this strong earlier, does her armor make her this much stronger?
Next, I see both of her ironclad hoofs slam down in front of me and she picks me up by my robes, “I fucked my life up, not theirs! I set them up for life, my husband, my son, they ought to have been fine without me!”
My feet dangling, I explain myself to her, “your… husband…. After your death suffered depression… his law firm failed... everything you gained with your pact soured.” She dropped me, gasping, but I continued, “the riches your father-in-law had invested vanished with the dot-com crash in the nineties, he took his life when he lost his fortune. Your husband died of heart failure a few years later while struggling to rebuild his lost fortune.”
“Shut up!” Her hoof yet again finds my gut. “Shut up you fucking liar!”
The soot makes me wheeze as I try to catch my breath, I gasp out, “Ask the one who bought you… he’ll tell you.” It’s at this point I’m aware of a dull wailing, cries of thousands out in the distance.
“That pact cost too much to just have everything fall apart! It wasn’t just my soul after all!” she glared, “I’m five fucking souls worth of demonic power!” her hoof smashes down on the ground, dust floating in the surrounding air, cracks forming under her hoof, green flames sparking between said cracks.
Sitting up, and wheeze again, “what do you mean?”
The Succubus glares daggers at me, “My soul was part of the pact, but I wasn’t the only one going into this body, I was just the core.” she growls, “Sara Baker would be the main ingredient, but there were others. The other was the one who gave this body, the porn star heroin addict who sold her body to cultists to get her fix. She sold her soul for a fucking fix and that’s when her soul got transmuted into this…” she motions to herself. “The beautiful damned bitch before you… The three cultists who were there were my first snacks, so it took five souls to make the beauty that is me.” She marches toward me, her hoofs and hips still sauntering as if it isn’t even intentional, but her nature. “You’re telling me even after all that, everything I worked for in my life fell to shit?”
I cough to clear my throat as I affirm, “Such is the cost of a deal one makes with a demon.”
The Succubus glares at me, “The things you’re claiming, they aren’t true… because none of that was part of my pact.”
Coughing still I manage, “What was it? What was so tempting that made you sell your soul?”
The Succubus’s hand grips her whip, “You wouldn’t understand.”
I get myself seated before her, my head too dizzy to stand, “Try me.”
Breaking eye contact with me she gazes to the ground, “I wanted to be… beautiful.”
My brow furrows, “That is all?”
Her hoof crashes to the ground, more green sparks and flames shooting through the cracks made, her eyes burning green. “That’s all? Yes! Fine! But you don’t understand, no one did! The smart girl in class, the one who’s bullied all the time, the one pushed around, who tries to get everyone’s approval? That was me! Worse yet my life was getting worse by the day!”
Clearing my throat, I figure I may as well taunt more out of her. “You and I walked different paths when offered the same obstacle.”
“Oh please!” she shouts, “At least you had your physical body intact!”
As I Get to my feet, I explain, “Well… perhaps. But a gay child?” I narrow my eyes. “Well, no self-respecting southern family wants a gay son. I was out on my own at the young age of thirteen… That’s when the Church took me in, and I found God.” I wipe more ash from my eyes, “What did you do when you were thirteen?” I ask.
The Succubus frowns, “I was the smartest girl in my class… braces? Fine. I get it. Posture brace? Fine. Helped me carry my ‘friends’ books. Friends I wanted to impress, wanted to like me.” She scoffs, “but then the day my legs stopped working, my arms had issues carrying the books for my fair-weather friends,” she spits, “They all left when they heard.” She sing-songs, “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. A wheelchair at best, and completely paralyzed, but death by age twenty most likely.”
Frowned, “So not just beauty, but your health?”
The Succubus rolls her eyes, “But as my dear mother put it… ‘It’s all God’s plan’, well God’s plan sucked Father! ‘You’ll have your mind,’ a fat lot of good that would do.”
“I suppose you’d not be pleased to know a man with a similar diagnosis lived to seventy-six,” I supposed.
“I’m sure he walked everywhere, huh?” The Succubus says, tapping her hoof on the dirt. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Yes, suffering in a chair would be much more preferable to… well, this…” I motion around me, “The price paid for dealing with demons.”
The Succubus’s eyes narrow, as do the eyes within the gems on her hips and shoulders. “I’ll show you the cost, Father.” She grabs me by the neck, her gauntlet-clad hand digging claw-line fingertips into my flesh. Fresh blood trickle down my neck as she man-handles me.
She brings me near the edge of the cliff and drops me to the ground. She crouches down on her haunches, her hands on her thighs as she survey’s the horrible sight before me.
Fiery pits of molten stone and sulfur burn across near endless planes. Within each fiery lake, massive horrors line the shores. They corral figures I assume are lost souls into the fire or doing horrific things to them should they not fall in. The devour some lost souls, some are dismembered, some chased. Massive goat like demons crowd the lakes, others hulking amalgamations of animal and man. Some appear to be half serpents, others fly through the ash-filled air with ease. Each a different nightmare in their own right. Further off in the distance, all tinged in a red glow of the fires below, no light reaching from above, I see walls and grand structures.
Through the air over these walls fly more horrible creatures. Screeches and screams echo across the hellscape before me. At the center of it all, a giant white spire almost touches the stone roof is over the giant planes. Seared red and brown stalactites hang from the ceiling, some massive, others appear smaller and spike-like as if to deter someone from going to the ceiling.
The Succubus seems more serene now as she glances at the central tower, “That’s the Blade of Pride. You can guess who lives up there above all of us.”
My eyes go wide at the thought, “God in Heaven…”“God isn’t here, obviously.” The Succubus taunts. “It’s made of souls too… everything here is. If they don’t break you, you suffer, if you fall apart… your mind breaks… you become an inanimate object down here. Sometimes you’re made into something useful…” she drags her finger across her metal clad thigh, and I spot the iris’s of the jewels on her hips almost rolling back in obscene delight. “Sometimes… you become a brick.” She stands, eyes far away, “I sometimes envy the bricks.”
As my eyes adjust, I notice one black horror in the sky growing larger. I get to my feet, backing away. To my surprise, the Succubus does the same.
“Are you seeing that giant black dragon coming at us or is it me being paranoid?”
“I see it,” I confirm.
The Succubus turns, defeat crossing her face as she does. Her is back to the approaching dragon as the whip slides from her hand. “... Father?”
Blinking ash from my eyes, I look at her in a different light.
Her eyes are watering as tears try to fall but turn to steam as they touch her cheeks. Even the eyes on her armor now appear to be blinking away tears, frantically looking left right, and behind themselves somehow. “Do me a favor, okay? When you get out of here… please tell my son, Jason, I’m proud of him, okay?”
I nod, hearing the mighty roar of the rapidly approaching beast.
"Kick Ubeil out of my grandson too… he’s a fucking pedophile but one of my Master’s most loyal soldiers. He hates water… the stupid fuck drowned in a public pool after some mother tased him for groping her kid. Not shitting you.” she laughs.
“I will Sara.” I agree.
She's taken aback, “That's… the first time I heard you use my name.”
“This is the first time you behaved like a human being,” I affirm.
She looks over the cliff, the giant Dragon seems to keep growing, just as I am certain it’s about to land, it is still nowhere near us. “He loves these grand entrances.”
Fear grips me, “What is that thing?” To my right, I hear metal vibrating against metal, and as I turn toward the sound, I see Sara is shaking.
“My Master… or at least… his mount. Hopefully just his mount. Please let it only be his mount.”
Ash and dust burst into the air as a foul odor accompanies the gusts of wind. A wind of decay and acrid ammonia hit me hard enough to rob me of breath.
A massive head of a dragon is before us through the dust the wind has sent into the air. Its scales are not solid, but rather warn, damaged and scarred. The drakes eyes are milky as well while it would look like a pair of massive horns curl around either side of its mighty head one horn is sheared off. The head is the size of a tractor-trailer, drool sloughs off the side of its mouth as it snorts a sickening breath through its nostrils. Its mouth opens and it emits a heinous breath as a booming voice speaks, “Welcome Back Harlot.”
“Always a pleasure Zelletia, you stinky bitch.” Sara says, holding her nose, “Here to pick me up?”
The dragon exposes massive rows of sword-like teeth as she grins, “Oh no… I’m Dropping off.”
The ground quakes beneath us as we hear a clattering of metal. Heavy footsteps make their way from somewhere behind the dragon’s giant maw.
The dragon’s head rises into the air hundreds of feet, its mighty neck making its head vanish into the ash-filled air above, a few steps of massive claws reveal something even more terrifying approaching us.
Black and red plate metal scrapes against itself as the creature wearing it strolls towards us. Heavy black sabatons cover huge feet that shake the ground with each footfall. Heavy thick greaves move up thick legs. A tattered and stained red cloth hangs from a belt wrapped around similar black armor, on the other side of the belt is what may be a living creature attached and dragged behind. A defanged and lethargic serpent slithers behind though the size of the thing rivals the largest snakes on earth. I see venom dripping from half broke jaws, sunken black eyes adorn scales that should have been shed ages ago.
At this creature’s hips is a myriad of blades, long swords, daggers, short swords, at least five on each hip. Some swords have blackened handles, some appear to have white and beautiful hilts made of silver and gold, tarnished they still look like works of art. A chest larger across than most men are tall leads up to what appear to be three heads. On his far left a mighty bull’s head, made of metal and thick black leather, it’s horns long and tipped in sharp points. Its eyes burn red as foaming saliva drips from its mouth. On the opposing shoulder is a similar head, its eyes burning green, though this head is that of a ram, its massive horns sprouting from a head made of metal and matted wool. Between both heads is a helm with a tarnished brown crown welded to its head. Burning wisps of green steam rise from the eyes behind a slit visor, still more steam rises from the vicious looking metal mouth.
I can see nothing behind the opening in the helm, as it appears obscured by a pitch black darkness, not even penetrated by the burning light of his eyes. Behind the creature, heavy and rusted chain-mail clothes a pair of gargantuan black feathered wings full of ash and black soot. With every quaking footfall more soot shakes from disheveled looking feathers. As the figure moves closer to us, I see it tower higher and higher over me and Sara, topping out at almost nine feet tall from the base of his sabatons to the top of his crown.
My heart halts in my chest, as I’m certain this is the King of Demons, the Morning Star himself. I must be faced with Satan. I try to pray, try to think of a single prayer, but before this horrible creature, this mighty demon lord, my voice fails, I feel all hope drain from my spirit as his form casts darkness over me that cannot justifiably be considered a shadow.
His voice echoes from the central head, turning its attention to Sara. The voice is deep, and rumbles forth from his chest, exiting from a mouth hidden under the center helm, and shaking the air and ground around us. “Sara…” he speaks in what I can only call what disappointment. “You have failed me.”
Submitted January 04, 2019 at 12:51PM by Zithero http://bit.ly/2COwfNp
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