Demon Core - Chapter 28: The Retching Darkness

~ [Peribsen] ~

Gallu| ♂ | Craftsman {Reengineer} Location: The Demon-King’s 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-King’s 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-King’s 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.

It’s 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-King’s magic are, in and of themselves, unique.

The once man, Peribsen, who is now a gallu under the Demon-King’s employ, lifts his gaze, following the underworld’s exhalation toward the door that leads to the upper reaches of the castle.

There, off in the distance of his vision, comes the counterforce.

It’s not the wind; it’s 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 aren’t 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.

He’s 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-King’s 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 someone’s gut to clench it shut. Fluids of the world and those born of the magics of the Demon-King’s 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-King’s 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-King’s 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.

It smells unpleasant.

Room Effects:[Living Bowels]: The room is alive. The things in the room are alive.

Every death results in a direct feeding of the room, allowing the room to grow stronger as it takes the bodies to use to grow.

~ [Cartouche] ~

Gallu| ♀ | Dancer Location: The Demon-King’s Castle, Floor Nine Level: 100

What was wrong with it?

Cartouche stands on the platform, looking around the heavy, perfume filled room floor Ten of the Demon-King’s castle. It is a floor that not only the first incursion party but also the second — the crusade — fought their way through. It didn’t stand up to the challenge.

Demons bound by the spiritual realm of lust — succubi and incubi – wander the room, having returned to life after a sufficient period of death. They are restored by the magics of the Demon-King’s castle. However, with the crusade being now far deeper down below in the dungeon, they have nothing to do and so, they mill about their own lives, like performers hustling around in the back of a staging area between shows.

The dancer watches them move about.

This floor was a failure, clearly. It is, regarding the audience, provocative and engaging, but it failed to captivate the souls of many for… extended periods of time.

Several members of both incursion parties fell to the room’s charms, letting their spirits be corrupted by its magics. Their bodies having broken and changed, they shifted from their prior shapes to those of the demon inhabitants of the floor.

But this is just a small segment of the total number of intruders.

The dancer sways on her feet as she thinks, not dancing to any particular tune but just keeping herself busy and in motion as she observes the space — the failed act of her performance. ‘Failed’ not in that it was an entirely pointless endeavor, but rather in that it didn’t reach the mark she had hoped it would have.

The same can be said of many other floors.

Once is a mistake; twice is a failure. It would be a shame to repeat this pattern a third time for any future entries into the castle, which are sure to come shortly. The world is large, after all, and there are many more outsiders who would seek to stop the Demon-King’s great work.

As such, there are so many more members of the audience to come to the stages of her performances, of which this is one.

An artist of any nature creates failures over and over again, as if they were constantly birthing out of a dead womb, creating only silent, still things. However, one day, the thing that they create will be different. It will be different not only in the eyes of the creator but also in the eyes of the audience; in the vision of the world as a whole, it might be perceived as something beautiful.

However, the process to get there is… messy.

Cartouche waves over a demon, looking at it and holding out a hand for a dance. Assuming something else, the succubus takes her palm as the dancer starts to move.

A ripple moves up along the succubus’ arm, the monster screaming in fear and pain as the movement separates its flesh from its bones. Its sinews rip, its joints are falling loose. Its limp body falls apart into a screaming, powerless ragdoll of disjointed meat that she swings around as her dancing partner.

Screams fill the room from all sides as the stage is reset for a new dance, something different that uses the lessons of the past to move the great act on toward a place of ascendancy.

~ [Abydos] ~

Gallu| ♂ | Demon Painter Location: The Demon-King’s Castle, Floor Sixteen Level: 100

Change.

The woman breathes, her chest heaving and sweat pouring down her face as she stands there rigidly in pose, the sweltering heat of the Demon-King’s castle enveloping her body.

Life is ever-moving and ever changing. It isn’t a rigid, static thing. It’s soft and malleable. It has a give when one presses against it, just the same as it moves against oneself, forcing a person to give in some manner. Life as a concept itself is alive in that manner.

This is the weakness of the art of depiction — painting, drawing, and such things. It is the attempt to capture movement in something that is very much still. It’s trying to capture a river in a jar without also losing the flow of the water. There’s an impossibility to the challenge that is beyond the human state, locked in its innate shackles of physicality.

His thumb presses into the priestess’ cheek, his upper palm resting on her chin as he turns her head toward the side, hot, living breath flowing over the edge of his index finger that seals her lip.

“Don’t move your face,” says the demon painter, stepping back and looking at her — a woman undergoing change — as is natural in life. “I need it like this.”

Life never stagnates. It always warps and flows, moving in some way or another as it moves toward a state that it defines as perfect. This state is entropy.

The living condition differs in this way from life, as those with a passionate soul do not seek entropy but rather the opposite. The full, total manifestation of everything brought into frame and reference; an ushering in of the vastness of life’s many experiences, made whole through the process of manifestation.

Abydos, the demon-painter, frames her with his fingers, stepping backward and forward again, his fingers sinking into the flesh of her torso and legs as he turns her this way and that way, mechanically adjusting her pose like one would a doll before placing it on a shelf.

“…Like this…?” she asks, her hand on her shoulder, holding onto the fabric of her priestess’ robe as if it were meant to stop her from falling down somehow, her eyes scanning the dark room that they’re in on the upper part of the Demon-King’s castle. It’s a room that the crusade has already moved through, herself included. It’s a room that has been… insufficient.

It wasn’t a good piece.

Or, well, maybe it wasn’t bad. However, it failed to achieve what had been hoped for. It was one painting of the ten-thousand that are needed to make up the staircase to the glory of perfection. But that’s fine. He has an eternity to get this right. This was just the first real attempt, but there will be another now, this time with new tools and mechanisms. A painter has so much more to employ than just a brush and their imagination.

Their eyes meet, but she doesn’t move her face as instructed. His hand rests on top of hers, both of them moving at the same time in the same direction to pull the already loosened fabric of the sweat-soaked robe gently down off of her shoulder, exposing her.

“No,” replies the painter, as the stained, white robe drapes down over both of their arms near her midriff. “Like this,” says the demon to the corrupted priestess Guezel, as both of their hands move back up again over her stomach and chest, placing her hand back where it was a moment before. “Don’t move your face,” he repeats, letting go of her hands and body with his and letting go of her changing expression with his own as he turns to return to his easel.

Living shadow leaks from the canvas, running down the easel’s 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-King’s Castle, Floor Thirty-One Level: 100

The room rumbles, changing before her, the Demon-King’s 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 hadn’t 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.

She’s 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.

It’s 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 doesn’t understand the nature of. It’s 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-King’s 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.