Creepypasta: Lords of Misery - Part Four

Creepypasta: Lords of Misery – Chapter Four

After he turned around it was a bit of an anticlimactic moment as they just stood there, drinking each other in. The sound of gunshots raked the soundscape, and occasionally a streak of white from a poorly aimed tracer round would tear across the sky like a shooting star made to kill.

“You’re a pretty one” the King of Worms giggled at last, at the individual before him. She was tall, almost towering even, and a being of blackest sentience, but he didn’t feel intimidated. He was too enraged to feel anything but frenzy and indignation.

“And you have strange tastes. Not that I’m not thankful for the compliment. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced” she said. Her voice was like burning metal; harsh, untempered, and yet possessed of a very lucid strain of hate. “Call me Thorn.”

She was an odd entity, and could have easily been described as a sentient expression of the least lucid potions of the midnight witching hour. Her form was vague, indistinct, like the wavering reflection of a female daemon that was reflected in a still lake. Several mouths dotted her upper frame, barbed tentacles trailed off of her back like an obscene cloak, and where anyone else had feet her body trailed off into a hazy palanquin which bore her aloft. Whether this was because she refused to touch the ground or the ground refused to touch her was anyone’s guess.

“You won’t be able to do anything with that puerile toy” she sneered after a moment’s pause, and Jake realized she was referring to his gun.

“Oh?” he chuckled. “Watch me.”

BANG

He hadn’t aimed for her. Rather, Jake had thought it prudent to dispatch the man at his feet, the one he had been in the process of interrogating when Thorn had made her debut.
“No loss. That one was weak, too weak to justify his existence. And thus quite useless for what I intend to do with the Maze” she explained, although in Jake’s mind she hadn’t really explained anything. She seemed to understand the mild confusion in his eyes because she elaborated.

“I need a champion, and I needed Dar’ghazt’s Maze for this” Thorn sighed. “It is something like the ultimate arena, in my mind, since whoever kills another while confined within its walls will eat the spirit and strength of the vanquished. My motley crew will enter the thing two-by-two, and each time only one will emerge having supped from the banquet of victory. Eventually one and only one will remain, a sole follower I can be proud to have as my own.”

“Don’t you recall the words of that wise man Joseph Stalin, ‘quantity is a quality all its own’?” As if to emphasize his statement the sound of heavy rifle-calibre rounds splintering open a nearby tree’s trunk was followed by a shout to hit the dirt and a garbled scream.

“Useless words from a dead idealist!” Thorn sneered, and for a brief moment he saw that same thing in Thorn that made him so strong. Not pseudo-immortality, not daemonic power, not hundreds of men with assault weaponry and a fanatical devotion to him and his will, but just that, his will in and of itself. A will to overwhelm, possess, and dominate.
“Anyhow, I believe I can suggest an opportunity that will make you happy. Very happy” she said, a mirthless, hungry sort of smile on her face. The light from the moon overhead refracted itself in effervescent coils all over her body, making her look more than a little to Jake like his “mother”, Negative Black. He absentmindedly wondered if the two were acquainted.

“Oh?” Jake said. He had to admit, this was proving to be a delightful excursion. The sound of an incendiary grenade starting a flashfire to his immediate right did nothing but perk his ears and attention further.

“I have brought the Maze with me and my men to this locale. If you’ll follow me, we can have our inevitable duel of sorts inside there. And, as I’m sure you know, whoever is victorious will consume the other’s soul, having rightfully earned the right to cannibalize their fallen adversary’s strength. Does this appeal to you?”

“By all means. But how do I know you’re not leading me to an ambush?” he asked, tapping the ball of his foot impatiently. He assumed she was incorporeal, to judge from her ethereal appearance. Otherwise he would have loved to deliver said foot directly to her forehead.

“Only two may enter Dar’ghazt’s Maze at a time. And besides, what you are paying witness to is the ambush” she pointed out.

“Fair enough” Coffin-Tease laughed, in advance of nestling his handgun back into its shoulder holster.

“Then come with me. It’s only a short distance from here” Thorn said, as she began to drift in the proper direction.

For Jake the walk wasn’t as awkward or boring as one might expect, simply because he relished the coming duel. There was just something about the combination of the battle going on juxtaposed with the forest’s unnatural stillness that made these woods seem wonderfully sick at this time of night; it resembled less of an unspoiled font of natural beauty and seemed more like the kind of place where a serial killer would hide his trophies inside shallow graves. The sort of place that pale thing, who, like Jake, wore a nice suit and enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, would set up shop in to lure children to some extradimensional Hell.

Speaking of sinister locales, he had often heard the environment within Dar’ghazt’s Maze was nightmarish in the extreme, and now he was going to bear firsthand witness to it. There were two questions which he felt needed explaining though, even if he could probably guess as to what the answers were.

“How did you get to Sidra?” he asked. Sidra was like any daemon. He loved money, power and pleasure. Bribing or coercing him wouldn’t exactly have been a trying ordeal.
“A combination of threats, payoff, and seduction. I like to cover all my bases” his antagonist snickered.

“And how did you ambush my Worms at the pier, when you made off with the artifact? Magic or snipers?” he asked. Since Thorn’s followers seemed to be mainly armed with handguns, from what he had seen anyway, he felt he could guess pretty well at this one too.

“The former. Shadow Isolation magic, to be specific. It can last for days, but a few minutes of the intense paranoia and clouded judgement it brings on was all we needed.” Thorn followed this with a cluck of her tongue (or whatever she had in place of a tongue). “We’re here”.

Jake saw his prize; Dar’ghazt’s Maze in the back of an open U-Haul, no doubt stolen as well. The artifact bore a passing resemblance to a Rubik’s cube constructed of onyx and slate, and measured about five feet by five feet.

“Shall we?” he asked. “And ladies first. I insist.”

Thorn sighed but did as instructed, touching the object and evaporating into a misty violet aura which was drawn into the thing. True to his word, Jake followed her example.

---------------------------------------------------

The first thing Coffin-Tease noticed after the abrupt change of scenery was the mocking, jeering laughter. He was far from a sensitive type, and it didn’t even feel specifically directed at him, but it was annoying if nothing else. Or maybe “worrying” would be the more appropriate term, since it seemed to be coming from the deformed skulls which seemed to partially decorate this place.

Within the Maze, it seemed to live up to its name by being an Escher-esque labyrinth of conflicting halls and stairs that went at geometrically impossible angles to each other. Bones were everywhere, particularly the aforementioned skulls, whether littering the floor looking as though someone had taken a hammer to them, or were wired into something kind of like ghoulish wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. Whether they were memento mori of those who had been here before, or just an inherent part of the artifact, he didn’t know and likewise didn’t really care.

“It’s beautiful…” Jake heard Thorn say, and he realized she was hovering over the ceiling above him. Apparently gravity was quite variably nonsensical within this place, too.

“Do you want to see something funny, Thorn?” Jake asked with barely contained glee. He hadn’t had the chance to do this for a long, long time.

Without waiting for an answer, since her opinion in this was quite irrelevant to him anyway, The King of Worms began to shift into his True form. His skin warped and convulsed, expanding again and again before gelling into a twenty-three meter long reddish-purple thing. It did look kind of like a terrestrial worm, if only in the same way that Humans resemble the False forms of certain daemons.

The King of Worms shot up towards Thorn with insane abandon, crushing and churning to powder the bone ornaments and sculptures between the two. As he reached the final stretch his seven-part jaw opened up like a snake’s gorge, revealing an impossibly long inner digestive tract lined with spiralling rows of grinding, gnashing teeth. Incorporeal or not, if she was trapped in the pocket dimension that was his gullet she would be leeched of whatever life or equivalent animating force she had, incorporeal body be damned.

Thorn made no move to avoid the incoming leviathan. Instead she muttered two sentences as the King of Worms made to swallow her amidst the chittering laughter of the skulls that made up this place’s morbid decoration.

“You play with guns, Jake. I play with the souls of the lost.”