Sickness = 337 = Hell On Earth
Sickness = 337 = Hell On Earth
I retraced the path that I had once wandered, now clad in an exoskeleton of blood and steel, dripping a thick sludge of hatred from where tears had once fallen. I’d been reborn through ash and brimstone, my flesh minced down to the molecules and regenerated into something vile, remnants of my departed self crawling through time to remind me of my bloody origins. My mind lay bisected on the veil between earthly perception and unholy omniscience—a state of cognitive instability that collapsed on neither side.
Yet this timeline had diverted towards a caliginous path, skewering a blighted abscess in reality’s matrix, letting its contents smear everything in blood and pus. The air remained crimson and brumous, a delicate miasma of blood between particles of aether. Each sanguine orb was faintly visible—exhumed celestial bodies hung by phantasmic ropes—their hypernatural properties only present at such a level of dissolution. These particles had been swollen with bacterial blight—a pathogen both biotic and infernal—finding plentiful hosts as they respired.
Familiar beings lined the streets—penitent worshipers and faceless silhouettes obscured by plague masks. The sickness had dampened their foreboding stares and savage belligerence, leaving them strewn about the cobblestone, groaning and wheezing in pain.
Along their gastric mucosa the sickness nucleated, inducing drastic bloat that arose not from gaseous pressure but malignant hypertrophy. Cells rapidly unspooled in malformed strands of contractile and digestive membrane—cytologic yarn wheels rattling with extreme velocity. Coarse, gossamer tissue expanded the stomach’s volume with haste, rippling and folding to compress its abundance.
As though it were an earthly disease, their leukocytes answered to the infection, swamping the fouled tissue with turgid abscesses. These suppurated caverns bulged, stretching enfeebled flesh even thinner.
The infection seized parietal cells with an edict to belch enormous quantities of acid. Such extreme vitriol eroded the aberrant tissue, detonating its festering pockets. Bulging stomachs erupted clots of pus followed by churning gastric liquor like a punctured artery, flooding the peritoneum. The deluge unleashed gluttonous hordes of bacteria—once contained pathogens now free to devour the flesh around them.
Viscera simmered like chunks of salt in boiling water, hosts clawing at the root of their suffering as though trying to excise the scalding agony from their own innards. The acid cauterized nerves at their tips until they responded with violent emesis, disgorging an even mix of blood and gastric liquid with such persistence that breathing became an infrequent blessing. And when each stomach became vacant, nothing was left to brand their esophagi but pure acid trickling down the mucosa.
Soon their omenta fell victim to the caustic soup, growing thin and flaccid until emetic convulsions readily tore them like silk. Livers, intestines, and kidneys sloshed unanchored through the solution. And in its relentless expansion their pleated stomachs engulfed the surrounding organs, visceral chunks sliding through the mucosa, their last extrudable material becoming flesh and blood.
Esophagi constricted and yanked viscera from deep within their abdomens against all tormented prayers. And they spewed thick streams of crimson vomit like semen from their ribcages. Gore ejected itself as though their bodies had finally beheld that they were merely objects—absent of worth whether their constituents remained inside or out. Or perhaps this spectral sickness had perturbed their humors so vehemently—bloated them from skin to entrails with so much torrid, viscous blood that their flesh had abandoned all integrity to purge the excess.
In search of greater destruction the pathogen infiltrated veins and arteries, their hearts pulsing with toxins that disrupted all coagulation. With such persistent, forceful vomiting came ruptures to nasal and retinal capillaries, and with abject hemophilia came incessant bleeding from every possible aperture. Life dribbled away in scarlet smears as though flesh were liquefying from the inside, smothering their faces and dragging them ever farther from singularity and closer to homogenous gore.
The infection soon tunneled into the outermost integuments, and abscesses grew beneath the skin with impossible haste, stretching their medium like leather. Dermal strata were diminished to rigid strands of flesh, torn away in succession against the pressure until swollen boils finally burst through, cumming a bloody stream of purulence.
The atmospheric suffering was palpable—an unrelenting misery radiating from all that could cry and bleed—boundless, immeasurable, transcendental agony without circumference nor center. The horror of death lies not in muted darkness, but in the sight of gore and the stench of rot, felt only by those who haven’t yet succumbed to her.
This was a place where affliction becomes a weapon of mass destruction with no conscience to inhibit its savagery. It was a place where death breeds, gaping her cunt ambidextrously and disgorging billions of her spawn in a gushing torrent of sickness, proliferating more cocks and more wombs until both her abundance and inflation are mathematically inconceivable. It was a place where pain remains ignorant to all precedents, all inhibitions, and all fundamental edicts of its own reality, gripping our skulls and fucking us through every orifice until we choke on its bloody semen.
I approached an alleyway between bloodsoaked houses and gazed down the passage, finding a creature locked into a fetal posture. It dug fingers into its abdomen and coughed with involuntary rage until the tussis was only a desperate retch, its tunic corrupted by dark streaks of blood. I spun the blades on my saw, prompting not a single recoil nor gaze towards the demonic howl, and I figured my threats may have been alluring.
Its tongue was too sick to carve words out of the sanguine air, afflicted leagues beyond what language could encode in abstract cacophonies of “gore,” “agony,” and “torment.” And its flesh was so bloated with putrid, bubbling fluids that any attempt at speech would have yielded nothing beyond an agonizing gargle.
The vermin’s throat contracted, birthing a portentous quantity of blood from between its jaws, succeeded by a flimsy chunk of digestive tissue that produced an audible squelch. The strand of entrails hung loosely, quivering as its vessel failed to breathe. Stomach-bound razors impaled a different segment of flesh with every excruciating fight to vomit, butchering organs as they prepared to efflux in a furious geyser of blood and offal.
The creature retched with only a muted gargle and its chain expanded like a diseased erection, forcing out thick, twisted strips of gastrointestinal matter that coiled on the ground in a crimson puddle of amniotic fluid. I figured such an enormous loss of vital tissue would be lethal, yet its expulsion persisted, the sickness fabricating new organs just to vomit them out again.
Beneath the sounds of gagging and squelching I heard a faint distorted laughter, and I wondered if the Antithesis was priming his throat to scream or if the creature’s final attempt at breathing had emerged as an oscillation. But the laughter became too fiendish and too manic to be mere coincidence, and the sickness itself finally revealed its amusement, buzzing through the vessel’s flesh and bones.
I’d bore witness to death and I’d tasted sickness at the tip of my tongue, yet never in my existence had I encountered a blight so savage. This plague sundered its hosts not to consume energy nor proliferate itself, but to masturbate to the joy of causing pain. It seemed the rift between myself and the supreme platonic ideal of pestilence—this gore sickness—was far slimmer than it had once appeared.
A distorted smear of steel and blood funneled itself into my brain—a dark gaping orifice towards which I gazed eternally. I began to question its nature—why my existence was akin to a chronic bout of illness—a rotting chain of entrails stretching from my genesis to my inevitable death. And I pondered why I was so insatiably drawn to its cathartic potency, using death as a weapon rather than an exit. My outline trembled and dissipated into ethereal fumes as my substance grew obscure, spilling farther from the mind that never fully contained it at all.
With empty minds, with garrulous tongues, and with blood-slick chains these animals worshipped their shrouded simulacrum of god—a concept titled supreme yet never once witnessed. With obsessive fervor they rotted like defective machines of flesh tearing themselves apart, spewing pistons and gears with a heavy stream of blood. And by gluttonous infection they scalded their phlogiston away, lungs deliquesced by miasma into a festering ocean of blood. They’d forsaken everything from skin to marrow—both in sacrifice and in plague—and then what came of it?
Amidst their frantic excavation for god through mountains of affliction, I’d found god in that very sickness, the shrouded object of worship being the agony and bloodshed left by its pursuit.
It seemed this city’s only merit was its situation on a river—a premier source of hydration, transport, and cleanliness had it not been rife with garbage. But as the river bank came into view at the mouth of a slender alley, I found that rotten produce and excrement were the least of the population’s worries.
Where I expected to see a flowing vein through the earth was a canyon of endless corpses, the river’s blood-tinted water only visible at its edges. Without exception, they laid naked, bloated, and swollen from waterlogged decay, streaked with crimson vomit and entrails discharged by infection with gore sickness. In a faint breeze their putrid aura wafted towards me, the nearly unbearable stench of rot clawing at my nose. In a desperate attempt to flee from disease, the commoners had poisoned their own water with the festering dead, shoving their most dreaded enemy’s cock down their throats.
I placed my sabaton on the arm of a cadaver and shifted my cumbersome mass upright, dark splotches redistributing under its skin. The gelatinous mound of flesh wobbled, sending a nearby crow skyward. With a careful gait I tread across the bodies, crushing maggots, forcing bloody post-mortem emesis, popping cysts and boils, and tearing chunks of decaying skin—a steel warship traversing a glorious strait of death.
I was never a slave to death—only an ally with a common mechanism of action. Tearing a consciousness away from a body that remains otherwise unchanged doesn’t slake me, and the act alone leaves me throbbing between my legs for a more fruitful indulgence.
To carve skin and slice through entrails is to degrade a being towards its constituents—to rupture the connective tissue between organism and substance. Gore screams of destruction beyond spite or abuse or even slaughter. It is the complete annihilation of the physical form, with every bone shattered, every vein severed, and every piece of skin shimmering with a glutinous veil of blood, the surplus adequate to ensure that the victim has been exterminated.
The profound arousal and euphoria summoned by mutilation only electrifies my blood, penetrating the most abyssal reaches of my mind with the knowledge that what I’ve done is truly savage. I see gore, I smell gore, and I taste its ferric stench in the air until my head spins with lust. Gore sloshes through my cerebrum in every waking moment, and on the rare occasion that my fury succumbs to fatigue, it fills my dormant mind with dreams blacker than death.