The Raven

Bloody Feast

I started throwing up suddenly and violently. It seemed as if all the horrors had gathered in my mind and body and it was simply too much for me to bear. I was throwing up for a few minutes, as surprising as that was, for the dead me. 

The sight before me was disgusting, but maybe I would have been able to stand it, had I not gone through so much before that point. 

My journey was too long and paved in blood and monstrosities. Having fought and bled I thought I would be okay, that I would be able to go through anything Hell threw at me, with strength and dignity. 

Once more I was terribly wrong. I hated the fact that I was so often wrong in judging my own abilities and weaknesses. I hated that when I needed my strength the most, I felt weaker than ever. 

My hands were shaking, and I felt drained like I had nothing left in me to fight the Dark Lord, to save my friend.

At first, I thought that what I saw was a river of lava, but after a few seconds, the truth hit me like a huge sledgehammer. It left me breathless and sicker than I had ever been before. It wasn't a river of lava, it was a river of blood. I could smell the metallic scent of it, and I could see how sticky it was. 

To the untrained eye, it did look like lava, but standing there I was sure that it was blood. Some of it was old blood, coagulated, some of it was fresh and I didn't know what was more alarming. It was even streaming forward in quiet determination, the same way a river would, but it was very petrifying to think of it as a river. 

"How many humans had to die to create something like that? Were they bringing live humans, like the ones I saw earlier, to fill that gruesome river?" I thought. 

It seemed to move in strange ways, and it even managed to spray the walls of the larger cave. The place was dripping with blood and I could feel a few drops of human blood falling on my head. 

Demon blood I didn't mind. I was covered in it. Human blood was a whole different story, my whole body quivered in repulsion and fear. Fear of not being able to stop the Dark Lord. 

I could clearly imagine some hellish sights in the land of the living and that made me terrified. My family, my friends, would they end up being used to fill up a river of blood if the Dark Lord managed to raise?

As I gathered my wits, I decided to follow the river of blood because it had to lead to the Dark Lord. It was, after all, a place that seemed to be someone's lair and I had a strong feeling it was his. 

I started hearing voices chanting in some unfamiliar language that reminded me of Latin as I slowly progressed down the river bank. Sometimes I had to jump from one stepping stone to another since it didn't have a normal bank. Their voices made a cacophony of sounds, some very loud and booming and others whispering. There were also some hissing and grunting noises. It sounded like a crowd I wouldn't want to meet, but I knew I had to go on. A gathering that big, made me think I was in the right place. 

Approaching them, I could hear other shrieking sounds. Those were humans screaming in anguish. Winding around the corner, I could finally see what was happening. The name was true to what was happening, it was a bloody feast. 

There was blood everywhere and people were strewn around like broken toys that a child no longer wanted. There was a central circle in which a huge dark-red fire burned, as red as the blood that was spilled all around it. 

In the center, there was a huge throne made of bones that seemed to await someone's arrival. Around that smaller central circle, there were bigger circles occupied by different kinds of demons, all feasting on the terrified humans.

Some of them seemed to enjoy the human agony, so they devoured them slowly, leaving them alive as long as possible as if fear was some delicious spice. Others killed them quickly and then chewed on their flesh as a dog would chew on a bone, with delight and fervor. 

I saw a few demons drinking human blood first and then eating the lower parts of their bodies and so on, leaving the heads as desserts. 

There are no words to describe fully and clearly what I saw that day. I could only stand there and watch as the humans were cruelly devoured, without any respect to who they were, without any remorse. 

We, humans, do kill animals for food, but there is rarely any cruelty in it, while in that hellish feast there seemed to be nothing but cruelty and unexplainable hatred for anything human. They wanted to obliterate anything that made humans... well... human. But that wasn't the most horrific thing. The worst thing for me came a bit later. I saw my friend as I stood there frozen.

She came in from another smaller cave nearby, hand in hand with the Dark Lord. Seeing his true form was shocking, but not as shocking as seeing my friend. 

She was dressed in a black gown, and she was as pale as a corpse. Painfully white, with red brimming eyes she started approaching the throne with a grimace on her face that I guessed was meant to be a smile. Even her teeth had changed, they were as sharp as needles and looked deadly. 

Her face was like a nightmare, the red color of her eyes making a horrifying contrast with her snow-white skin. She was herself but wasn't herself at the same time. 

As I studied the terrifying couple approaching the throne, she seemed to sense my presence. She spun her head towards me making a full circle with it which creeped me out. "I seeeee youuuu!" She said in a kind of creepy sing-song voice that made me reevaluate if that was, in fact, my friend.