Awake once more, she watched unseen.
They huddled around their tables in twittering packs. They lurked at their work stations in sightless obedience. They curled in their bunks and dreamed of places other than these. They mated like frantic animals, all desperate breath and surging skin. They lowed and bleat like the livestock they didn't know they were.
It was disgusting.
The elevated ape had always been foul, but there had been something in it, once. Some divine light that radiated from its putrid flesh. Now? Now it was a toy. A puppet, dancing on the strings of some lowly power. The pet of something less worthy. It could not see what it had been reduced to.
This sordid herd suffered that indignity quite literally. Their owner's branding removed their eyes, those quivering orbs of jelly and protein by which the radiant light of creation entered their skulls. Worse, they had given them meekly, in the thoughtless trust of comfort. There had been no fight. They had not been forced. There was no doubt they would have given more: their ears, perhaps, their noses, or even their hands, were their repellent phalanges not needed to operate the machinery that turned flesh into fruit.
She watched as one human leaned forward, pressing its smiling face towards the voice of another. There was affection there. She felt the grace of it pouring from the hideous sack of meat and water. It offended her to see such pure spirit alive under the complacency of fleshy packaging. It could be repressed, pushed down, denied access – but it was there. She could feel it, and was drawn to it like a hand to the wick of a candle, to snuff it out.
There was anger there, a chemical slurry in its tissues, mingling with the affection into a potent blend, ready to be turned to heady wine. She could taste the virtue that it could become. It shone so strongly that it took no effort to find the abhorred thought in its repellent brain that there could be change. She could hear it thinking that its beloved, this placid creature with such an arresting voice, could be more than what its people had become, if only it would let itself be discomforted. It could feel it in itself, and let shame descend like a mantle to smother the flames of change. It understood what they all were, but would not let itself see it.
It was not the first time she had seen a human turn from the altar of discomfort, the call of diligence. Never had it been so potent as in this room, in this factory, on this miserable spit of rock and metal and fuel. Her sister would have thrived here. Her coils would have wound around the inertia of their comfort and tightened. Her many mouths would have torn them asunder piece by apathetic piece.
It would not have been a challenge; Belphagor would have feasted.
But there were many ways to approach a feast.
She unfurled an arm, extending her finger out to its full length. The smiling human had short hair, cropped close to the head. Its neck was covered in a clinging, filmy material above its skin. She pressed the tip of her finger past that barrier, touching the dead cells that made its upper dermis. This point, the nape of its neck, rose in horripilation as it felt, but could not tell, what had touched it. The fine hairs rose, and she trailed her finger up gently, to the delicate dip of the foramen magnum.
She felt it. That flickering flame of anger, righteous, fluttering: this could be better. They could be better. This one could run with the other it cared for, could stand up to the Overseer, could take command of this factory. They were many; the Overseer was just one. She could feel those thoughts, buried, shameful, fearful, but bright, and glowing, and full of that tiny, unquenchable gift of hope.
This may have been what drew her. That thirst. That potential. Anger had always been a gift of the divine, and though she could no more inspire change than she could wish for betterment, she could corrupt it.
“Hate,” she commanded, speaking her word into place that between places, where these walls were both the golden brutalism of the factory and not. The human's will was soft as yielding fruit: it was as unprepared for her command as a screaming infant was for the forceful hand of a hateful adult. It could no more resist it than it could have held back the tide.
She felt its mood turn. Felt the anger curdle beneath its upper layer of thoughtless happiness. She could taste the affection that remained, bubbling bright and full of joy, but it was soon saturated in the excreting venom of rage. Rage at their own complacency, their own cowardice. Worse, it could see that pathetic fear reflected so neatly in this one that it had smiled at. She could taste the impotent frustration of knowledge that their beloved would never rise up.
Like one watched the dull orange of a flame lick over kindling, she observed as the thought sunk down to the nerves. She saw the hate expand out from this bubble, touching on everyone in the room.
None of them would ever change their circumstances. They would remain the sightless beasts of burden to their mighty Overseer. They were nothing, and less than nothing, and every single one of them was complicit in the misery that was its shame.
The bright joy of its spirit rotted, mouldered, and festered into the bile of hatred.
It was delicious.
She lifted her hand away.
The human's smile faded from its face. The other, unseeing as it was, did not notice. It continued to babble on, some insignificant detail about a fruit yield on the factory floor. That sparked the fury in her little poisoned primate yet further, and she watched as it built the rotten tower of wrath deep within.
The human screamed. Its tiny voice pierced the wide hall that it and its fellows troughed their feed in. They turned, heads whipping, as though they could look at what had shattered their shallow pleasantry. The one sitting across from it tentatively reached out an arm, its hand extending to touch the other.
Hate had been her command, pressed to its heart like a thumb to an overripe berry, sinking in to the yielding flesh. Its own hand came down, clamped on the other, and yanked it across the table. It dragged them over the slab, drawing back its bludgeons of flesh and bone and began to tear. The soft, wet sounds of meat cracking against meat were soon overcome with the sound of the others screaming. Some crowded close, plastering their skin to her fractured champion, grasping it to haul it from the other.
No matter. She unfurled more hands, sullied more fingers with the touch of flesh, and felt their wills as pliant as the first had been. She watched as a fist connected with a face. The cheek split from the force of the blow; the bones of the knuckles clattered on the edge of the mask that was worn. Skin cut down to bone, letting blood mingle slick and sticky, before the fist was drawn back for another blow.
Soon, the room was a frenzy of rage. Blood spilled as seams were torn. Bone shattered under bone. Mouths dripping with saliva opened and bit the broken ridges of teeth down upon bruised, ragged skin.
It was a twardy display, far from the subtle corruption her siblings feared her for. That, though, was reserved for the unworthy inheritors who had an ounce of potential. Lesser though they had been, she could almost have seen in them what she had once been asked to kneel to. Not these, these weak-willed nothings that bore the flame and did nothing with it. She watched as they turned on each other, repelled by themselves and destroying each other for it.
Well, some of them. She felt one stumble backwards, hands outstretched, shaking its head. Its hair was long, and it shifted in clinging, gossamer strands with each refusal. It took a halting, half-step backwards, low moaning escaping its mouth as it formed words she did not care to hear. One more step would have it within the folds of her cloak.
She was not above pettiness. She let herself take form just as it took that step, and felt its flesh sully the fabric she had draped herself in. The human stiffened up and whipped around, as though it could see what it had bumped into. A trembling hand reached out, and she lowered herself to place the beak of the skull she wore into its tremulous grasp.
Terror hitched in its throat like the clicking of a lock. In a burst of speed surprising for its ungainly form, it tore from the room, feet slapping against the floor. She felt its fear, felt its desperation for one who could fix it. There was no bravery there as it sobbed and cried out for something greater than itself.
And that was most intriguing of all. There was no deity here – save that she knew the Great Enemy was ever present, never acting – to answer. Yet faith burned bright for something. She could sense nothing worth it: this place was nothing more than a barren hollow of metal and flesh. It blended reality in a mildly interesting manner, but was ultimately as inert – and repulsive – as the humans that swarmed its halls.
Yet this little stumbling creature continued to cry out. It could not be to something greater: therefore, it must be to something it thought was greater.
Curiosity was greater than disdain. She drifted behind the stumbling human, an unseen miasma in its wake as it squelched and thumped down halls it could not see. When it caught the breath in its lungs and stumbled on, it left behind a red handprint on walls that appeared different to it than she knew them to be. Mildly curious, she pressed one of her own to the sanguine print. She could feel the protein already begin to denature against the cold surface... and also do something else, in the world that the human could not see.
What a pretty little nepenthes these humans had tumbled into. She drew her hand back, and followed the soul that cried out for something unworthy to save it.
Limping, stumbling, it entered a wide room that reeked of brine and blubber. Pain muted in favour of adrenaline that pulsed through its body, and worship saw it sink to its knees in front of the abhorrence that it saw as saviour.
It was two things at once: what it was, and what was seen. It was not confusing for her, as she herself was more than what interacted with the base world. Yet whatever this was, it was not the same as she. Neither like herself nor the human, it turned to perceive the little stumbling thing. She heard it speak. Its words compressed in the air, travelling in ways that the human could hear and parse. And so, she let her awareness drift down, sharpen into one perception of what was occurring in the human's world.
In this limited view, she saw what the human believed to be there.
This false god was a monument of pulsing flesh. Rippling, turgid tentacles shifted under a fine and pristine robe. Wings of meat draped in a mockery of how humans had once imagined pure spirit to look. A shimmering halo of light glimmered upon its veiled head, casting great, rippling shadows high upon the walls. Long, elegant hands reached down, extending gently towards the terrified human.
“Overseer,” the human was whimpering, sobbing as its vocal threads thickened with mucous secreted by terror, “it's terrible, they all began attacking one another, and –”
It babbled on. She barely heard it. What she could sense within the human stunned her. Appalled her. Whenever humans had worshipped, they had worshipped something. A god, a spirit, something Other. A story, a song, a moral, a tale – something she was incapable of understanding, something she found disgusting, but something nevertheless.
This? This upright mollusc? This caecilian mockery, rearing on its cirri, displaying itself in the radiant glory of those who sat at the throne of the Great Enemy, proclaiming divinity?
“Hush, now,” came the voice of the Overseer. It was a kind voice, soothing. A reasonable voice. It reminded her of the humans when they cooed to an animal they shared their homes with. She watched with disgust as it reached out to clasp the human in a gentle embrace. “Be still, be calm! You are safe here with me. Now,” the upper set of hands rose to cup the face, thumbs flicking as though to brush away tears, “we shall go to where they are, and you shall tell me all as we do.”
She watched the way its tentacles shimmered in the harsh factory lights. They gleamed with a lustre not unlike pearls, and just like pearls, she could feel the grit the slime had coated deep within. The human began to calm under its touch, its cries fading to soft, hiccuping sobs. The Overseer bent and lifted the human as she had once seen them lift their own pets. As it moved, the light shimmered on the iridescent jewellery it had bedecked itself in. Each colourful orb gleamed wetly in the luminescence, and that was when she realised what they were.
Eyes. Each of them perfectly formed orbs of protein and jelly, reclaimed of their purpose for flagrant aesthetics.
Mammon would have approved. Beelzebub would have laughed. Even she, once, may have curled her lips in a disdainful sneer. Once, when her pride had shattered her to pathetic pieces, and she tried to reform the glory that was denied to her.
She was not given to the rage she corrupted in the hearts of men. Yet, at the sight of this putrid mockery shushing one of the Enemy's chosen in its coddling grip, she felt the corrosive wrath pulse through her very being.
What hand had she in this? This was no victory. This gentle backslide into oblivion, where she would never drink the wine of purity, corrupted? This thoughtless reduction, idly given, thoughtlessly drifted towards? And to what? What did this Overseer offer? Endless labour, mindless pleasure? Were they not sick to death of it? Did they not long for more?
It was outrage. She would not let it stand.
Ice formed on the walls of the factory floor, cracking the moisture in the air as her presence took physical weight. The human shivered in the arms of the Overseer, breath misting between them. The Overseer's shifting tentacles slowed their undulating wriggle as the cold took hold. The vile tableau turned to view her, and her fingers furled like the thigmonasty of the sundew as she felt their regard.
They were not hers, but when had she ever cared for that?
The Overseer toppled as she rushed it in a flurry of limbs, smoke, and fabric. Its weak attempts to protect itself were not enough to prevent her from grasping it by the wing, by the arm, by the pulsating flesh by which it slithered over the polysemous ground. Her hands, formed from the hollow fury of thousands, grasped for this monument of false divinity and began to tear it down.
The human screamed as it tumbled from its grip, falling to the ground and landing hard on the icy stone floor. She heard it whimper. She did not care.
To sully her hands was repellent. To feel the way this worshipped creature fell was a humiliation. She was beyond this – had been beyond it even when she first cracked against the unworthy earth. It would pay for the ignominy.
Whatever passed for a throat in the meaty body rippled with ululations of shock, pain, and fear. Reduced to the world the mortal experienced as she was, she heard it press in all around her, as if it beat her with its fleshy tongue. The piercing screams of the human joined the hideous chorus.
“Overseer? Overseer?!”
She could bear it no more. While multiple hands gripped the Overseer, yet others reached for the human. One planted in the long strands of keratin that made its hair, nails biting into the scalp. Protein welled in fat drops of haemoglobin and plasma, dirtying her hands as the sobs and whimpers defiled her hearing. Yet more hands rose to pin the arms, to grasp the thighs. She lifted the human up, as she had done with countless millions of them, to tear their limbs from their bodies. She restrained herself – for now.
The Overseer clutched at her. She had it – him, she could feel that sense as its awareness soaked into her from the touch – pinned, overpowered, but shock and pain had done that. If she let herself become too distracted, perhaps it could writhe out from her grasp. Base as it was, it was other than what she was used to.
“What... are you?” she heard him say. Outrage flared through her that he would speak to her, as though they were equal, as though he had any right.
“I have not lowered myself to you,” she rasped, and there was satisfaction in the way her voice seemed to cascade through him, pulsing through every inch of throbbing meat. Some of the tentacles in her grasp swelled, reminding her of nothing so much as her brother's harem of puppets as they impaled themselves on his tentacles. Disdain warred with something she had not expected – a spark of amusement.
She dashed it the moment she felt it. Such sweet things were gifts she had long turned her back on.
The human sobbed. She ignored it for now, and instead reached for the mantle of glittering eyes that the Overseer wore.
More fingers formed, tip-first, nails sliding in among the beaded blanket of eyes. The curved tip a claw delicately slid behind one slippery organ. The Overseer tensed, twitched, and she realised he had attached them not to his clothes, but to the outer body he displayed. They pulsed with his blood, swelled with his pressure, and grew wet and soothed by his own slick mucous.
“Which of these?” She hissed, thrusting the beak of the skull towards his veiled head. He flinched back, as though the sickle-curve of her décor was a danger. To remind him of where he stood, she grasped one tentacle tightly. Her fingers sank deep into the turgid flesh, and she began to pull. The muscles tensed under her fingers, bulging in building pressure before the tissue tore, and blood, copper-rich and gleaming, spilled from the perforated meat. The Overseer moaned lowly, like a tremour in the earth. She felt another tentacle grow turgid under her touch. The tip began to unfurl. She grasped it below its swollen bulb, squeezing down in disdain.
“The eyes,” she demanded. The sweet sound of stretching flesh swelled over the sobs of the human as she pulled yet harder. In a striation of fibres, the suspensory ligaments that made up the tentacles snapped, tearing away sweetly in her grasp. The Overseer moaned in pain, lowing like the cows he kept in his employ. What was he but their fine bull, no less worthy of the knife or the bolt than they were?
Blood burst forth, copper bright in the harsh humming factory lights. It flowed from the twitching stump of the limb in slick, eager spurts, spilling out in stuttered adulation.
Another tentacle bulged under her grasp. She could feel its tumid swelling as fluid pressed at the thin tissue. It unfurled it like a flower of fleshy petals, lips and segments peeling back to reveal long, slick strings of slip. This viscous discharge oozed down the length, pooling in the clutch of her hands as the tentacle began to buck into her grip.
She had seen this before, too. Her brother, Asmodeus, was no more enamoured of the filthy rutting that the unworthy inheritors partook in than she, but he exploited it. His own slippery appendages would swell and pulse like this, growing slick and bulbous to better force entry into those who wanted it. Or, in his case, who thought they did.
Disgusting.
As if in humiliation, the Overseer pawed at her weakly. His fine fingered hands pressed to one of her forearms. It was a push, but it was one that clutched at her, sullying her with the unworthy touch of its physical form. Meanwhile, the throbbing phallus in her hand spasmed as she slipped her fingernail against its slit. He moaned again. His slick mingled with the blood, and he writhed in a mass of shifting desperation that would have been worthy of pity, had she any ability to give it.
And yet the human in her grasp thought it so worthy of worship.
Her claws pinched one of a multitude of eyeballs. Aqueous and vitreous humour burst over her fingers like the guts of an overripe grape. She felt the collagen, the salt, and the sugars begin to die on her freezing touch, though the water roiled off of her like a droplet skittering across a hot pan. Vapour rose between the glowing halo of the Overseer and the curved beak of her skull. She could feel it dampen the keratin, and was once again reminded of how vile a place this physical world was.
And yet The Great Enemy loved it? Had allowed time to occur, that it may be created? That such supposedly great work was then bequeathed it to these putrid apes, who would bend and scrape to something so lowly as the moaning, twitching thing in her hands?
Why? Why?! Was this not proof she had been correct?
She laughed. It was the dull, wooden laughter of a corvid's croak, rising not from her beak but from all around her. It pressed against the Overseer, and she felt his fury pulse in tandem with his shameful desire. Terror mingled sickly with excitement in him. He'd found something new, and for all it made him buck and whimper in humiliation, it was close to how things had once been.
She felt something twist in her, a deep, lonely sort of feeling, a longing, and she could not abide that. She tore at the eyes decorating this monument to complacent lust. They clattered to the floor as pearls cascading from a savaged noblewoman's throat. Each one of them caught the light as they fell, unseeing, and glimmered as a perfect gemstone could only aspire to.
She slammed a hand down to pop them between her fingers. It collided with yet another of the Overseer's tentacles, and she dug in her fingers, smearing jelly and protein along his erectile tissue.
“Ah,” he gasped, low and desperate, “Ah!”
The bulb at the tip of that tentacle began to flower too, peeling away from its fleshy folds as if trying to entice vermin to come pollinate it.
“Overseer?” she heard, in the smallest, most pathetic of voices. She thrust two fingers between the lips of the human, clamping its filthy tongue into place. It gagged. Saliva pooled around her talons. Like its object of unworthy worship, she felt it moan too, though this pitch was far from ecstasy.
“He is well handled,” she rasped, and watched as the creature wilted from her voice. The juddering mass of spilling eyes and flopping, slimy tentacles under her twitched, a jiggling jolt flowing all through it. Fluid oozed in slick and slippery trails of mucous, mingling with the coppery spill of his blood and washing into a pale, sulphurous yellow. Well, why not? There were many roads to hell, and if she stole from her brother's plate, then it was no more than he should have expected. She let her hands trail up and down the tentacles, claws parting flesh just as a boning knife parted sinew and ligaments on a butcher's block.
“No,” he gasped, and oh, she could taste the humiliation in his voice from that word alone. Rage mingled with desire and pooled in a stew of outrage. She knew him, in that instant: she knew what he was, and how he was as like to any pompous cult leader she had ever seen. He was pathetic. A meagre thing, not fit to writhe even in the filth of the world that the Great Enemy had given breath to.
Her stroking hands dug in. Her claws slipped under the upper dermis of his tentacle and bit into the swollen flesh beneath. The bronze tone of his tissues suppurated with the shiny copper of his blood and the off-white of his seminal fluid as she twisted. His moaning rose high to a scream as he filled the vaulted ceiling of his barbaric factory with a hymn to damnation.
The tentacle was tossed, still twitching, to the side, where its sputtering, spattering end could spray and slop all over the human, who whimpered in terror against her grasping hands.
“mi-ka-El,” she hissed, pressing in until the beak of her skull touched the fluttering veil that obscured his head. It had once been said to her, had it not? The radiant halo cast its sickly light down upon her, and she dimmed it with her infernal touch, as fingers lovingly curled around the tines and began to pull. She could almost imagine...
“Certainly not you,” she denied herself the thought as yet more hands found his parts. She stroked her thumbs lovingly over his wrists. She twisted her own until his swollen appendages brushed against her palms. They twitched and fluttered against her touch as she pressed down and in, claws scraping the delicate insides of the dewing tips.
“What do these humans worship?” She asked, as her hands found another tentacle. Two planted on it, pressed down, and tore in opposing directions. She heard the stretch of the sinew as it split. She smelled the metal of his blood, the salt and protein of his slick, the raw distress at this debasement that he found he craved. “A vile and contemptuous sack of resentment, clothed in outrage and radiant in lies?” She laughed, cold and bitter, tilting up her skull so that he could not miss her intent on looking down on him. “Why, you are nothing like who you imitate! You are no insult, you are no usurper – you are every fool with delusions of grandeur! At least these humans you trick are shown an illusion!”
He shifted in a sloppy mass of blood and blooming arousal, as if he could crawl away from her ravenous reach. “Like them, you are nothing but a hole to penetrate. A wound to abrade. A sore to scrape raw,” she hissed, letting her claws curl inside his weeping openings, piercing the skin from the inside out. His moan was rhapsodic, punctuated by a weeping, lurching sob of agony as it was. “Do their desperate pleas soothe your wounded pride? Does their gasp and sob of pleasure match to the whimpering you once heard from defeated foes?”
Oh, there was mortification in his vocalisations. He clutched at her, hands fisting in her cassock as his weak limbs trembled against her onslaught. He tried to shove, he tried to pull her in closer.
“Does the bleating of their adoration remind you of your youth? Do you coddle them while you clamber to reclaim a glory once lost to you?” She laughed again, louder now, the unclean sound shaking the walls of his factory. “Pathetic!”
An indictment, she knew, and not just of him.
She would not allow herself to know more of what else it could be.
His bulbous tips swelled against her hands. She rolled her thumbs over them, claws crossing the groves of their floral budding and lacerating the flesh. As she did, she turned the human in her grasp, and commanded it.
“See.”
It did not need eyes to obey her command. She filled it with the vision of what it had worshipped, and let him know that it had. He threw back his head, bucking against the hands that grasped his halo, and slopped his seed over her crooked knuckles, her cupped palms, her tearing claws. The proteolytic fluid was no different than that of any animal. It began to coagulate in her freezing touch, and she smeared it down his torn and sopping robes with a disdainful touch.
The human's tongue moved under her fingers. She felt its abject horror to witness its adored god in such a state. Yet when it turned its gaze to her, blood began to pool in its empty sockets. The creature whimpered. Its limbs went slack in her grasp. The mind would have slackened too: she felt the inhibitory chemicals in its brain spike, but she ignored it, and supplanted her will over its own.
“Witness,” she croaked, “and know what you both are.”
Her arms pulled, cracking the human's shoulders from their sockets. Flesh tore. Bright red blood mingled with metallic copper, and the scent of iron rose in the air along with the screams. She tossed the swooning human down atop the Overseer like a useless rag, its still spurting arms in her hands.
Two new ones flared behind her, glistening in the coruscation of transferred creation. For a fleeting moment, she felt what had to be the grace she was long denied, but it was gone before the barest wisp touched her spirit.
She dropped the arms in disgust. The blood and semen staining her form was too much. The still pulsing tentacles in her grasp were abhorrent. The pressure of their cries against her hearing was intolerable. Even the air of the factory was an insult, pressing in against her with its physical presence. She had sullied herself, debased herself by mingling with them on their level. It crawled on her like a parasite, desperate to drag her pure spiritual being down to its abominable pit.
To flee before these creatures would be worse than enduring their loathsome existence. She drew her hands back to herself, letting the Overseer and the human huddle together in a mutilated pile of meat. One hand rose as if in blessing. Another extended two fingers down, like that goat-headed fool would sit. Two arms rose out in Orans, palms turned upward, facing the crumpled mass before her.
“Remember always what you are, and how though you blind your humans to that truth, that you will always know. May it live in you as rot riddles the roots of mighty oaks. In the heart of you, you will know that you are pitiable.”
One hand cupped before the chest of her cassock, where the heart would be on a human. Another floated by her skull, index and middle finger raised, ring and little finger crooked, thumb brought across to hover near them.
“Go in humiliation,” she commanded, and drew herself back from the world of mortal stain, leaving nothing but the puddle of protein she shed on her egress, and the fractals of slowly melting frost that had marked her fury.