The Flayed Awakening

Chapter 6: The Lair

An indeterminable span lurched by as Emily drifted in and out of consciousness, her mind's fractured lucidity perceiving only flashes of her new nightmarish existence. Blurred vignettes of being suspended like a slab of carrion meat inside some dank subterranean catacomb...fleeting impressions of shadowed entities in ceremonial garb slithering amidst grotesque configurations of mutilated flesh and bone.

The cloying reek of decaying offal and dried alchemical solvents assailed her nostrils, compounding the waves of nausea brought on by the Stygian lair's ubiquitous penumbra of evil sentience. Even the faint candlelit flickers illuminating the hellish tableau in stuttering strobe-like intervals seemed to burn with profane animus - shards of baleful incandescence dripping from rancid braziers and impaled torcheres.

It wasn't until her semiconscious form was finally lowered onto a filth-encrusted slab of volcanic rock that Emily roused enough to take in the full abhorrent grandeur of the demimonde she now found herself in. An immense grotto cathedral whose soaring arched ceilings and fused ganglia of woven stalactites evoked the ribbed and phallic architecture of some inhuman ovipositor or corrupted womb untimely brought to term.

Protruding at grotesquely asymmetric angles amid the cyclopean stonework, gargoyle-like countenances of indescribable depravity leered down from their earthen pore-niches. Fanged, lidless apotheoses whose expressions condensed every facet of mortal suffering into exquisite, eternal disappointment at their weary progeny's perpetual shortcomings.

Drawing her eyes across the sprawling grotto chamber, Emily gagged at the "specimens" gruesomely preserved at various ritualistic "stations" - petrified cadavers gruesomely contorted into symbolic architectures in an eternal mockery of carnal ecstasy. Flayed victims mounted like sneering cherubim totems anointed in their own desiccated viscera. Haunches of meat-husks roasting on spits amidst frenzied cockatrices of chewing rats and carrion insects...

...even what Emily initially mistook for archaic oversized chakrams hanging from rusted chains, but upon focusing her battered gaze, realized to her spiraling horror were in fact gigantic iron crucible bowls lined with rows of severed human heads frozen in excruciating porcelain betrayals of their final death-rictus pangs.

Strange primordial rhythms echoed throughout the subterranean cathedral, deep throbbing intonations that felt as much malefic séance as the pumping heart of some impossibly ancient evil gestating anew. Emily recognized the discordant layers amid those reverberating frequencies as forming the same torrent of alien glossolalia that had been plaguing the Black Ridge countryside - countless unseen throats uttering gnostic obeisance in the names and tongue of ineffable cosmic deities better left mouthed only at the forfeit of one's immortal soul.

At the center of this diabolic Grand Guignol stood a raised ossuary dais constructed entirely from fused humanoid bones - a relic-throne unto itself atop which reclined an entity that for one heart-rending moment Emily feared was Trevor, so desiccated and flayed had his mutilated form become. Only the lidless glare of recognition sparking beneath those hallowed obsidian sockets dispelled her confusion. 

No, this was no mere earthly mortal, but something far older. More ancient even than these cyclopean masonry crypts and the countless other sacrificial temples raised unto its insatiable pantheon of sadoangelic rapture across brutal epochs untold. A timeless, infinite hunger for the obliteration of hope and the uncaring consumption of all forward-thinking novelty entire.

Its/His aura of irresistible entropic charisma sucked the remaining essence of life inward toward the cosmic sinkhole of his consciousness, a libation of inimitable gnosis bidding all who peered inward with undiluted perceptual faculties to surrender utterly -- not simply in body, but every fractured psychic molecule of their transcendent spirit. To finally release them unto the worm-wound ecstasy of disintegrating back into the Abyssal Mother's infinitely cold, silent, and unbirthing womb of embraces.

It was all Emily could do to retain her sense of autonomous ego-existence against the avalanche of metaphysical hunger now inexorably bearing down on the corporeal theater of her consciousness. The overpowering euphoria beckoning her to join it in eternal unwholeness...to shed this temporary sack of light's fragile consciousness and instead flow outward into an infinitely regressive state of unbecoming, washing away in undulant waves of non-distinction.

But survive she must, if for no other purpose than to unravel the mysteries underlying her captivity here and ascertain what profane role -- if any -- she was intended to play in this nighted antefane's demiurgic mutilations. To somehow uncover the indelible truth linking her precarious existence to whatever unspeakable progenitor ritual this sordid, neo-primordial spectacle was fermenting toward.

So flaying her mind inward for whatever vestigial shreds of bureau training still maintained traction on reality's dwindling shorelines, Emily centered her focus on studying every grotesque new detail of her prison sanctum. From crusted piles of blackened bone shavings and ichor slashed like calligraphic flourishes across the cathedral's cyclopean floor motifs...to the blasphemous bas-relief frescoes depicting scenes of infinite, unrelenting torture stretching across towering mural spans.

It was in scrutinizing those hellish panoramas that her fractured psyche finally recoiled before the central revelation underlying this entire operation - utter, irrevocable hopelessness. For across every sprawling panel and vacant expansive surface, the same depraved axiom was chiseled, slashed, and branded by innumerable millions upon millions of frenzied strokes in a galaxy of spent flesh and bone:

"There will only ever be the Abyss. Always has been. Forever will merely become again the Abyss. Every living hope and rebirth naught more than spiteful illusion to be opened, gutted, and purged back into its source unbeing. Mark well the eternity of futility stretching unto oblivion and know yourself likewise a momentary eddy of withering sentience within the soulless Void's yawning ontological abyss..."

As Emily slowly parsed the cosmic finality driving this ritual's annihilating ambition, her mind reeled in near-catatonic overload. She was but the latest in a neverending lineage of transitory meat expendables being processed for the abhorrent pleasures of whatever unbound monstrosity had spawned this cavernous resanguination cathedral.

Sickness tinged with bitter resignation finally overtook her will as she resigned her fate to oblivion. What little spiritual spark of resistance that still persisted at her core, she knew would soon be expunged by the onrushing darkness -- either by further unspeakable tortures here at the hands of her captors, or worse, by the seduction of merging back into the metaphysical Vacuity itself.

Perhaps it was fortuitous the only beckoning release remaining would be complete cessation.  To finally let her guttering flame of estranged mortality gutter out, supplicating unto the greater nighted philosophy whose deification had always and would always encompass the guiding luminance of all cosmic eras.

Eternal Oblivion.

Infinite Abyss.

Just... unbecoming.

So be it, Emily steeled herself as foetid amnionic cascades of sentient black ichor sluiced up and over the altar-slab. Time to go fetal into that lightless ontological sea whose ante-diluvian curses, arias of discipline and negative ecstasy would finally sing her soul's last emptied vessel back to its rightful disannulled union with the ravenous Void.

Her only solace at this most desperate nadir - that not even these putrescent mitre-helmed renditioners, nor their slough-birthing demiurge-sire -- could conceive the scourging flames of sacred fury which yet endured beyond her surrender. Which henceforth scathed her innermost light into one mass radiant concentration of all-too-human REFUSAL.

An irreducible Whole-Sight refusing to unbirth, refusing to surrender self, refusing to accept cessation, void unredemption, or renunciation of Being's womb-primacy upon these nihil-idolators' funeral altars.

As her fragmented psyche achieved a singular coalescence of will, Emily knew she would not only survive this grotesque birthing-rite, but transcend its every abominable self-annihilation to instead emerge reforged into some higher omnitrack continua of pure Gnostiform self-overcoming...