Ending H

Painted Red

 An unnatural hunger has sapped you of your strength... You don't want to die in this horrible place but sometimes there are fates worse than death, especially where the old gods are concerned...

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Your hunger pains have become unbearable. Despite having enough rations to last you three days, you consumed it all within the first few hours in the terrible dungeon of Fear & Hunger. Or... Was it just a few hours? Had you truly been here for days, going around in circles, slowly inching your way deeper and deeper into the depths until you no longer remembered which way you had entered from and no matter where you strayed you only seemed to delve further and further in until you were nearly crippled from terror and starvation.

This is it... This is how you die.

...you didn't want to die.

The smell of blood, gore and sex filled your nostrils. You must be truly desperate, as your stomach lurched and you dry heaved as your gut cramped. It was faint but overpowering. You found a trail of desecrated body parts, skulls decorating spears, arm bones outstretched, either a warning or a welcoming embrace, shrinking and decaying genitalia placed in the open maws of silently screaming, or perhaps laughing, skeletons that seemed to mock your need for sustenance. You followed the scent of death, mouth watering and stomach gurgling, until you came to a blood trail. Wet. Fresh. You stumbled after it, delirious. The macabre decorations seemed to point you in the same direction, boney fingers, some with flakey skin still hanging loosely on dried, mummified cartilage, flexed outward and drawing your attention to a sudden drop that was accompanied by a worn, twine ladder that was on the cusp of snapping at every knot. You followed the blood down and struggled your way down, the sounds of wet chewing and wet moaning echoing in your ears. Your weakened grip failed you and you dropped down a few feet onto the blood and urine soaked ground.

Primal groans and growls filled the metallic-stained air. The atmosphere was heavy and humid, almost hot in spite of the chill that seeped into your joints. The darkness was stifling and you had to step carefully and slowly as you crept deeper into the hollowed out chamber. You dragged yourself against the stone walls, old wooden support beams lay a top of pickaxe scarred rocks. Other markings could barely be made out, something that looked like claw marks from a crazed animal, or perhaps a human being, as your fingers found an old, dried blood-trail that was marred by loose fingernails and shredded flesh.

The back of a naked person manifests from the darkness. The pointed ears of a grey wolf rests atop their head and its pelt shields their skin from view. They are noisily chewing and sucking on something in their mouth, something that both disgusts you and causes your mouth to water. You step to the side to get a better look and you cringe away as you see a fully naked woman covered in dried and drying blood and gore tugging on a strand of intestines between her teeth. Her face was obscured by the mask but it was clear that she was crazed, her beady eyes shining in the darkness as though they belonged to a feral beast and not to a human being. The naked woman growled at you as you passed but didn't move to harass you.

To your right, there was a man sodomizing another man, his guts spilling from his slit belly and pouring onto the cold, rough dirt ground. He wheezed every time his 'partner' thrusted into him, the sound of blood in his throat bubbling as sticky skin slapped against sticky skin. The sodomizer had a mouthful of the other man's neck, between his ear and shoulder, and had it in such a grip that you could hear muscle and tendon crunch underneath his teeth. You don't know how much life he has left in him but your groin was beginning to feel the same intensity of distress as your stomach was.

All masked people wore a wolf's head and they all were naked, covered in blood and in some state of feast or being feasted upon. Bloated corpses with exposed and half eaten intestines were pushed against the walls until they laid nearly on their sides. Other than having a torn-out neck and being gutted, they suffered no other trauma, save for the blood that clearly coated their thighs and that was rotting just the same as the rest of the body.