Hunting Horror

 

Rope burned the skin of my wrists with each movement I made. I hung, naked and exposed, in the dying sunlight of the ancient cave. Chanting whispered around me and slid over my skin, sending shivers down my spine. The hooded figures formed a circle and spoke a language I couldn’t understand. I felt their eyes on me and though I knew what they were doing, I couldn’t comprehend what lie beneath.

A human-sized hole sat beneath my dangling feet, opening into the darkness below. All around the entrance were scratch marks and blood. People had fought to avoid going into the deep dark that lurked beneath the floor the cultists stood upon. I turned my head, wincing at the pain that shot through my shoulders. Every person’s face was concealed, hidden from view. I wondered if they feared revenge.

The words grew louder and consumed the cave, bouncing from every surface and setting my ears to ringing. There was a preternatural power that hummed in the words and my ears ached with each whispered syllable. A whimper escaped my lips and I winced, biting my bottom lip to try to distract from the pain throbbing in my mind. 

The pain ensorcelled my mind, pushing against it and beating, trying to break what will I had remaining. It overwhelmed my pulse and my skin ached from its constant thudding presence. My bones seemed to tremble, the pressure building on my body that sent cries tumbling from my lips. Everything hurt in ways no words could describe. All I could focus on was the suffering. Long gone were the voices. Only the pain remained.

When I could take no more and swore I felt blood slowly ooze from my ears, I cried out, a scream that broke the constant unending sea of words and echoed through the stone. It stopped the chanting and I panted in relief, tears slipping down my cheeks from the mind numbing anguish I had felt just moments before. 

“There you go,” the cultist whispered. I felt their smile more than saw it. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything. A hand touched my cheek, caressing the skin. “I will remember you.”

“Wh-”

My voice was cut off as the rope was severed. I dropped through the hole, disappearing into the great darkness. My feet hit the wet cave floor and I fell to my knees. I breathed in quick pants, blinking my eyes several times to try to focus on what I could see. 

Sunlight poured down from the small hole above me. Yet everywhere I looked seemed to be alive with writhing shadows and darkness. My brows furrowed as I stared, eyes narrowed, trying to make out whatever was moving beyond the edge of the sunlight. 

“Hello?” I called. Now and then I would see a glimmer of a face or eyes, but it would fade just as soon as I had seen it. My mind still pounded and I wondered if it was just the residual pain of a spell.

An eerie silence hung in the air, heavy as my aching body. I couldn’t hear the cultists above or anything moving in the cave around me. I tugged on the rope holding my wrists together, testing the bondage for ways to break free. When none could be found, I raised my hands to my eyes, shadowing them from the streaming light so that I could peer into the darkness beyond.

I would have been better not to know. The thing that lurked on the edges of reality shifted in and out of my sight. At times there were eyes, a great serpentine body, a haunting face of chaos, and large rubbery wings that were unnaturally large and impossible to hold in the space of the cave. Long tendrils moved in and out of its snake body, writhing in the dark, long hooks with sharp claws on the end of each appendage. 

A gasp escaped my lips and I let my hands fall away. With the sunlight coursing down, it dared not come closer. My heart began to race as I glanced up, peering at the hooded faces that watched the hole, waiting for whatever was meant to happen to me. 

“What? Too cowardly to kill me yourselves?” I grumbled as they watched. My legs were too numb to stand and my body too sore from hanging to manage to try to run away. Hanging stretched the shoulders, compressed other parts… I wouldn’t be well soon enough.

The light changed from yellow to orange as the sun began to set outside. It dimmed, narrowing around me as I sat helpless against it. The scratch marks above told me people had tried to climb out, and would have made it if it hadn’t been for the cultists above. 

With each disappearing bit of light, the being in the dark moved closer. Hooked claws were barely visible on the edge of the light. It grew closer and closer, touching the skin of my shins and leaving long scratch marks. I gasped, pulling my legs in tighter, even as the last of the light began to fade. 

The darkness stilled around me as the few bits of daylight died, glittering out of existence and leaving a soft glow that provided no true light. Dusk streamed into the cave from above, barely enough light to see by. The hooded figures leaned inward, suddenly eager to watch the thing that lurked in the hole below them.

My eyes slowly looked from above me to around me. I sucked in a breath, feeling the beast edge closer though I could only barely see it in the faint light. “Be inside me,” I whispered, not loud enough for the cultists to hear. “Come into me. We will leave this place together.”

The creature stilled, face suddenly right in front of my own with but an inch separating us. It was smiling, broad and terrifying, before the face shifted and became the visage of a demon and then that of a hungry snake. My hand trembled as it rose, slowly, to touch the face as the cultist had touched my own. 

“Let us be one.”

A flurry of movement clouded my vision as the face bled into another and then another. The tendrils of its body whipped outward, hooks latching themselves into my skin along my arms, torso, and legs. It pulled me upward, holding me aloft by my skin. Blood dripped out from each wound until a puddle began to form on the ground beneath me.

The cultists laughed, gasping and smirking, both entranced and terrified. A series of whimpering cries escaped my lips, mouth opening to scream only to have the beast lunge forward and slide itself inward. My mouth was full and the thing continued further, pushing down my throat and into my body, pumping every forward as it consumed me.

The serpentine body shimmered and twisted in the dark before the hooks pulled my legs apart, exposing my center to its hunger. My eyes slid closed, tears falling from the pain and gagging pressure of the thing in my throat. Cold electric tendrils caressed my inner thigh, testing the flesh before exploring upward. 

A shudder of strange pleasure ran through me at the faintest of the creature’s caress. I released a moan that vibrated along its impossible skin deep in my throat. That vibration traveled through it, was consumed, and then shivered along the sensitive skin of my opening where its tail played. Great bat-like wings that glistened hung above us, attached to something unreal and beyond human perception into another world that the beast came from.

The tail pushed inward, sliding into my entrance and splitting me open with its force. It drove upward, invading without regard for my body. Pain filled my senses along with the haunting pleasure of its energy within my core. My body trembled and shuddered, overwhelmed by the being that began to push into me, pumping me from both ends and bringing cries of divine pleasure and agony from my lips.

Blood and wetness coated my thighs. Every hook in my skin held me still, preventing me from moving. There was no way to escape and no end to the creature’s hunger. It ate every cry of pleasure and every scream of fear, adjusting its writhing patterns to elicit both more thoroughly when one waned. 

It pulled me higher in the air until our bodies were against one another entirely. The phasing unreality of its form swept over mine before beginning to move inward, body melding with the flesh of my form. Skin tore open as it moved into reality once more, blood and viscera exposed to the open air. Within me it attacked, teeth ripping into the body that it was easily consuming.

My screams were silenced by its hunger. Even still my hips rocked against its thrusting tail, the pleasure barely registering against the vicious pain. Still, it persisted, moving faster and harder to pull my mind from the terror of our bodies merging to the blossoming pressure of ecstasy. 

The hooks in my arms pulled forward, wrapping my limbs around the beast’s sliding serpentine body. Our skin began to merge, mine fading from existence then coming forward again, grey and shadowy, that of the beast invading me. Where its teeth and claws and hooks penetrated, a growing sense of blossoming rapture began to form and my body shuddered with the enormity of it. My mind screamed against the reality the creature was forming inside of me. Just as the cultists’ chanting had driven me to breaking, now this creature snapped what little sense of identity remained.

A scream of bliss came from our bodies as they entangled and ensnared, coiling around one another. Bones broke and faded, consumed between us. Black nothingness poured from us as light from a sun, skin ripped and was devoured. It was unmaking and making, becoming and unbecoming, death and birth in one rapturous moment.

Then the light was gone and the cultists could see nothing. There was no sound, no pain, no fear… just the bliss of nothing and eternity. My all seeing eyes opened in the dark and with the screams of those who had dared capture me singing of my freedom, I forged my way into the world in blood and death.