Not a nice place... (Taken from Reflections in the Mist)

Farther in

The cloud slugs, flesh and ichor, giant maggots on fleshy land.  A river of vile and horrific human waste, fields of huge insect legs and a mountain on innards in various states decomposition.  I had seen with my eyes a scene of hell, I was travelling through the void, and my eyes ached with the images of obscene and corrupt visions.  I had enough of it.  I wanted to leave, I nearly gave up.  I stared straight ahead, still floating and being dragged forward by forces I could not see.  Closer and closer to the mountain.  In single a moment, as my will nearly broke in this land of despair, I felt something.  I knew that this was not all that I had to see.  A feeling of there being something else.  It was the reason that I was sent here, the reason I let myself go.  The reason behind what was going on back where we came from.  I also felt empty in my stomach...

A decaying reek dragged my conscience back from my feelings; I was right at the base of the mountain and moving around it.  The mountain was huge.  It was easily comparable to any other midsized mountain in the world.  Except none of them smelt, of looked like this.  For about a kilometre I passed alongside.  Every once in a while something would burst and spray a thin gooey bile of varying colours.  Luckily the only thing to hit me was its smell.

I looked over my shoulder to see the field and river disappear into the distance before being obstructed by the mountain.  Those grotesque landmarks were replaced by new ones.  A new mountain river flowed down and grew into another throthing, bubbling and ill river, coursing its way for a mile or two through the fleshy land and emptying out into a large body of water like a lake.  Which I gladly noted was far away in the distance and not in the direction that I was travelling.  Massive furry mounds of black and green mould lined the banks of this river.  They grew out of the flesh, the river lapping at them, sometimes knocking off clumps of the fungal growth which was swiftly wisped off downstream.

But what drew my attention was where I was heading.  Past the mountain the topography changed again.  The land was flat stretching off into the horizon.  Nothing jutted out of the ground, nothing went through it and no maggots could be seen.It was flat except for a hole some way off.  The sides of it rose out of the ground slightly like a crater, which is where I was being drawn towards.  I left the he mountain of body parts behind me.  The earlier fleshy surface which I had travelled over had been replaced by scabs.  Black and brown dried skin peppered the floor.  Small red veins snaked through joining them together.  Some had dried and the scabbed flakes peeled back revealing newer raw looking lesions beneath.  The coppery smell of blood was ever present.

It was here that I first heard the sound of another human.  I could hear the faint sound of someone screaming.  Then it stopped.  Then again that wail, then nothing.  Every minute or two another scream followed by silence before repeating again and again.

As I neared the hole, I noticed the scabs thinning out, getting less and less and being replaced by large ulcers.  Red raw with thin, split white septic tissue, each sore and boil was covered with parasites wriggling around in an acrid discharge frenziedly eating on the exposed wounds.  It was a carrion banquet from the lowest depths of life.  My skin crawled and not for the first time I struggled to stop myself from being sick.  All this compounded by the sound of screaming.  The closer to the hole the louder they became.  It was clearer to hear that they were being made by a man and that they were not screams of fear, they were screams of agony and pain.

I concentrated my gaze on the edges of the craterous hole.  Soon enough I had reached it but was not able view what inside.  Arriving at this new destination I could see for the first time what it was.  The sides of this crater were made out of white and bloodied fatty tissue which had literally been pushed out of the ground.  They sloped up from rips in the ground, squishy and gristly.  I floated up and over them and into the crater itself.