studiobondurri Chapter 28: The Retching Darkness
Chapter 28: The Retching Darkness
Chapter 28: The Retching Darkness
~ [Peribsen] ~
Gallu| | Craftsman {Reengineer} Location: The Demon-Kings Castle, Floor Thirty-One Level: 100
Perennial shadows surround the man as he stands there, his silhouette framed within the empty halls of the Demon-Kings castle. His presence the only disturbance inside of a massive, square, empty chamber stands out, as if he himself were the first nail struck into an otherwise motionless board. His hands are held out at his sides, as if he were holding something aloft and had yet to decide what to do with it. His body is stiff, marking his indecision as he stares down blankly toward the ground. His matted hair, greased into long, thin strands that hang over his neck in bundles, waves in the underground winds that push through the depths of the Demon-Kings wretched castle.
Air pressure inside an open-mouth cave system will, generally, always balance itself out to be equal to the pressure outside on the surface. However, the load placed on the surrounding material increases with depth, as does the make-up of the stone and soil. With varying compositions comes varying properties in relation to structural integrity and so on.
Of course, there is a bit of leeway here, given that the castle is more of a magical, artificial construct as a whole, rather than a naturally occurring cave-system. Different rules apply.
His hair blows as the castle exhales, the hot winds that stem from the heat source at its deepest pit, the Demon-Core, pressing outward as the pressure inside the tunnel system is greater than that of the world outside.
In turn, after this purge and the pressure equilibrium, the air pressure outside of the castle will be greater than the inside, leading to an influx of air as it is drawn in through the gate and down into the bowels of the underground. In. Out. In. Out.
He stands there, his hair moving in just that same motion back and then forth.
Its as if the castle as a whole were a living, breathing thing. And, really, who is to say maybe it is?
The properties of the Demon-Kings magic are, in and of themselves, unique.
The once man, Peribsen, who is now a gallu under the Demon-Kings employ, lifts his gaze, following the underworlds exhalation toward the door that leads to the upper reaches of the castle.
There, off in the distance of his vision, comes the counterforce.
Its not the wind; its the crusade. It is the destructive force that comes to destroy this unique construction just the same as people had come to destroy his bridge.
The world is full of so many unique things, some of nature and some of nurture, such as this place or such as his own precious bridge. And just as with it, there will always be those who desire to destroy its incredible, unique beauty.
The engineer watches the lights come from a distance.
Humans as a whole arent capable of really appreciating beauty neither natural nor that which they themselves make. Yes, there are those who cherish it deeply. However, there are also those who would tear it down, who would cut it flat and lay roads over it, those who would destroy amazing works of wonder only for the sake of logical sense and rationality, robbing the future world of such amazing gifts for the sake of their own gray pragmatism.
Just like humans make their own cities more droll, more pragmatic, more gray, functional, and inorganic with every passing generation robbing them of their unique characteristics and charm so, too, will they do to the world as a whole.
Hes decided.
Something roars in the distance, the drone of a marching stampede with weary, grim faces, led by a speck of azure blue.
Perbisen turns his head.
The color reminds him of the blue-birds that used to fly over his bridge.
He lifts his hands, the ground shaking and rumbling, as if the stone floors were attached to strings wrapped tightly around his fingers as he pulls them this way and that, within the sight of the encroachers, changing the world, changing the bones of the Demon-Kings castle, as if he were reshaping a body by cracking its solids. Deep water presses out from the moving surfaces like leaking marrow, hissing as it touches the hot surfaces.
He begins to shape and make floor thirty-one of the castle himself as his first grand project in his new employ.
Great, twisting organic spires begin to move and grow out of the soil and rock. Things grow from the surfaces a combination of organic and inorganic matter, symbolizing the communion of the two worlds in which they all live. The square chamber, now blank, changes. The entire room, as massive as it is, fills and tightens unnaturally like a compressed intestine full of bio-matter, squished by a hand that has reached into someones gut to clench it shut. Fluids of the world and those born of the magics of the Demon-Kings power begin to leak and drip all around them as the chamber turns from a square into a long, sideways cylinder a tube-like tunnel. He stands on one end, and the encroaching crusade comes from the other.
Peribsen moves, the castle moving with him, as was decreed by His Majesty, the king. Rough edges and perforations begin to form in the cylinder on all sides on the inside of the shape. The stone fractures and tears, as if it were being perforated. Organic, soft, living growths begin to fill the rips, pressing into the damp inside from beyond, at first like roots but then like worms.
The tunnel begins to break further, twisting into ups and downs as if its overall shape as a whole was that of the inside of a parasite-riddled snake ascending a ledge.
Movement fills the crooked space not from people but from things.
The Demon-Kings castle, as a whole, is a beautiful architectural marvel. However, it has only represented the inorganic nature of the world construction, building, rigid shapes, and ideas of the physical and metaphysical planes.
What it has been missing is organics.
Organic shapes. Organic smells. Organic movements.
Architecture moves. It lives and breathes.
It is the creation of organic beauty from inorganic substances.
- [Section Three - Wrath] -
[Floor Thirty-One] {Crush}
A sensitive space, the thirty-first floor of the Demon-Kings castle is made out of a confused mixture of meat and grime. It pulsates, writhing in and out, moving those who tread through it by itself, pressing them past difficult ridges and clusters of parasites to wear them down.
The walls ungulate in and out, compressing repeatedly at different intervals to facilitate this process.
Living shadow leaks from the canvas, running down the easels spread legs as heavy condensation. It pools down at its stiff feet like spilled ink that he steps into. Abydos looks at the blank surface as he considers the changes to make before then taking his brush and setting to the task. Living, moving lines of shadow crawl out from the puddle, creeping toward the room, toward the priestess, like fresh, scratchy pencil sketches on paper marks of changes to come.
~ [Ruhr the River-Sorceress] ~
Human | | Sorceress Rank: SSS Location: The Demon-Kings Castle, Floor Thirty-One Level: 100
The room rumbles, changing before her, the Demon-Kings castle once again making itself seen for what it really is.
Malignant.
Ruhr lifts her hands, staring blankly ahead of herself as she stands at the head of the crusade. Softly glowing water, imbued with holy magics that intensify in their radiance to a level that hadnt been present before, drips from her fingers as a surge of magic presses up through her core. The water rises from the base of her inner body, welling to the surface like the burst of a sudden realization. It comes forward, escaping from her, as she fully intends to not only flood this new floor before they step foot on it but to flood it so much that it bursts like an over-filled intestine, so that it ruptures, so that the Demon-King and every other wretched, disgusting, foul thing below drowns a thousand times.
For her, this was all just a fun game before.
Then it was about survival.
And then it was about something else Zac.
And now
The stones beneath her boots crack as her arms hold themselves out, as if holding the weight of the ocean itself aloft. A flood of violent, holy-enchanted, enchanted water blasts out of her hands and into the now-changed room beyond it, which she refuses to even entertain.
One thousand demons and monsters are washed away by the rising tide, their bodies burning in the holy water as if it were acid.
The sorceress and the crusade march on forward, not-stopping, as their boots crush over the melting bodies of the freshly dying and flooded.
Wash it away.
Shes going to wash it all away.
All of it.
Ruhr stares blankly ahead as she walks straight through the tunnel and its horrors now pacified on the way to it, to the beast, to the rot that started all of this.
Its a gangrenous wound that needs to be cleansed.
The Demon-King.
~ [The Demon-King] ~
SOULS COLLECTED: 750,001 / 1,000,000 WARNING - THE DEMON CORE IS REACHING CRITICAL MASS
Screams fill the world, stretching from every shadow that is born of the weak glows of candlelight that remain lit in the towers of civilization. A sea of flickering flames fights against the howl that never stops, the roaring of the Demon-Core, as its radiating power makes itself heard throughout the world as a constant, never-ending drone.
The wretched Demon-King sits on his throne, watching the waltz of souls trapeze through the super-heated air of his court. The stone walls around him crack and crumble as even they begin to falter under the immense pressure that releases from his body. The paper he writes on no longer remains whole, instead burning to ash in his presence, requiring him to switch to more unconventional canvases for his work, his long, heavy claw cutting into the paper held out for him.
A cut, flayed, and rolled out soul, stretched thin and wide, is held there by the demon Byblos, who sits on his lap, watching as he carves black-magic words into the thing that screams but has no mobility of its own anymore.
His claw, radiating with supernatural heat, carves into the meat of the trapped thing, screaming with a hiss as he drags it along, writing a word that he, in all of his horrific maliciousness, simply doesnt understand the nature of. Its out of place.
But something, somewhere in his black heart, tells him to write it, and, as an artist, he knows to listen to such inclinations, such musings, as they lead one to ideas and places one would have otherwise never gone toward. Such things are often very unusual.
The lesser-demon leans back against him, looking at the word that he cuts into the flayed being, her hair resting against his chest.
Goose.
~ [Shaushka] ~
Elf| | Classless Location: The Wildlands Level: 04
The elf stares at the Demon-General, standing there. His body is covered in fur and bones.
Muffled voices fill the clearing; thousands of crying, screaming people, gathered into a mass of prisoners, stand bound and captured, surrounded by swarms of monsters of horrific shapes and compositions. Armies of the Vildt and the corrupted of many legions. The death-march toward the Demon-Kings castle has come to a pause.
Others come too. Six figures more move out of the shadows, and all seven Demon-Generals collect in the clearing, together with two more Demon-Knights.
Ah mutters Shaushka quietly, staring.
And then, all nine of the demons turn toward the north and begin moving, marching as a great horde that trails in the wake of the Demon-King's castle toward the human-capital that is now closer than ever. Thousands of bodies move as monsters usher the prisoners onward, the ground below them rumbling. The ashen, trodden, and dead landscape quakes as the demon-army makes its way toward the final battlefield, which is not much further over the now-still distant horizon.
There, she feels something calling to her, but she isn't quite sure what.