very soon, the light will vanish. it will take with it all the hope and joy we've ever known.

[thepull_mods]

Who: Siren's Port
When: The night of Tuesday, October 18th into the morning of Wednesday, October 19th.
Where: In the mind, in the dreams, in the unconscious of the sleepers.
Summary: --
Warnings: These dreams may be considered not safe for work, with violence, gore, death, underlying sexual themes and other mentions of graphic nature. Having them is completely voluntary. They will strike your character when they are asleep (and if they do not sleep, your character may be pulled into a trance-like state for an undetermined amount of time, at the mun's discretion).

Reactionary logging is encouraged, and feel free to use this post to do just that. Anyone hoping to do dream-walking and other psychic-related shenanigans should ask for permission first, though. And, of course, there will be one log per day of the dreams that happen at night for the entire event.

There is a gore and violence warning again tonight. Please be advised that some dreams may contain triggering material.



Sometime in the middle of the night, you start to feel the burning in your limbs. It creeps up your toes and into your legs, to your stomach and into your arms. It feels like something is eating you from the inside out, but you know nothing is. You stare listlessly at your limp body, willing for the pain to go away.

GO AWAY

The whispers don't trouble you any longer. They keep the silence out.

They remind you that you are still alive.

(Alive. But there's no point anymore.)

It is a small comfort. For now.

You are sitting in a banquet hall in a run-down hotel. It's nothing special, actually it's rather boring. The tables are gray plastic. The metal chairs are a little dusty. Your feet don't touch the ground. Bored, you shift the weight from front to back on the chair, idly creaking. The whole room smells of old, cooked food. An old, salty smell, like a school cafeteria. The carpeting is dusky pink. The wallpaper is patterned with lilies and yellowed with age.

Across the table sits a young conductor. He is smartly dressed in his white uniform, with his red hair and conductor's cap, and you know you should keep your eyes on him because even if he is like this now, even if he is smiling and friendly and clean right now, he will not always be, so don't turn your head--
A train whistles, ear-splittingly near. The whole room rattles.

This banquet hall is actually on a train. You knew it all along and curse yourself for forgetting. In your distraction, you look away. The spot where the young conductor sat is empty.
A red creature is climbing on the ceiling, just scraping your peripheral vision. You look up.
It is a man, you know that, but it is still a terrible sight. Blood everywhere. Smudged, smeared, all over the dingy banquet hall.

"I don't care," you say quietly, "None of it is mine."

The red creature hops down from his crawl up on the ceiling - bloody handprints in a trail, up there - he slithers close and smells of thick, hot blood.

He is still just a man. Your own voice in your head is calm and flat, young and weary.

"Then maybe it should be yours, kid," he mocks you. "Didn't I warn you?"
You tremble. But instead of screaming, you lean forward, and lick a little blood from the man's cheek. Your tongue pierces a hole as easily as fingertips through wet tissue paper. You push at him with both your hands and tumble right through him.

For one moist, horrible moment you are him and he is you and both of you are nothing, no, both of you are blood and meat. Then:

You are standing in the middle of a white city, naked from head to toe. You are in a glass display box on a platform of black marble. Perhaps it was an aquarium first - it is long and narrow, not enough space for you to stand upright. The surrounding buildings are dazzling and imposing, classic in form, like a storybook version of Heaven. The white city is only clean for a moment, before the families come in with their puffed sleeves and floppy bowties and ruckus. You cannot smell the dust, the sweat, the food from the carnival - only glass.

Music wafts by, cheerful and empty.
At first, it is as if no one at all sees you. No one stops to gawk as they do at the bellydancing girl and the minstrel band.

A young boy and his guardian (Fermet) stop. The boy is an ordinary, brown-haired dullard. Fermet has beautiful long hair and a smile that's not all kindness. The boy presses his hand to the glass. Your hand fits over his perfectly.

"Get away!" You scream at him, pounding the glass. "Run away!" You are shrill. You are only ten and you are screaming so hard your lungs and throat hurt. No one in the crowd looks. They are clapping for the hootchy-cootchy dancer on the corner.

Fermet has your heart in his hand, pulsing and alive. He licks it from the right ventricle to the pulmonary artery, and something deep inside you twitches, uncurling at the obscenity of it.

You pound on the glass, and the boy on the other side looks at you with pity. "He's going to kill you. He's going to do the worst!"

As they walk away, Fermet puts his arm around the boy. It begins to rain, paths of water like tears streaming down the glass all around you.

The buildings are demolished in quick clouds of plaster dust. The Ferris wheel in the distance is disassembled. Crowds walk by you every day as the white city becomes part of a busy street. You sit with your bare back against the glass, watching the world pass you by.

Sometimes people stop: familiar faces, acquaintances from your life, even complete strangers. They touch the glass, they look at you, but no one ever speaks. You touch their faces through the glass, sometimes, but feel no warmth.
An old friend, a grinning blond man, breathes fog onto the glass and makes a little smiling face, pointing at it before walking away. But you can't smile.
Snow swirls around on the street outside your glass cage, and you shiver, hugging your bare shoulders. Someone pulls you closer, wrapping you in a red cloth, warm from body heat. You close your eyes, and lean into that comforting, solid weight. Something smells like static electricity.

When you open your eyes you are standing in a forest of giant trees, even bigger than redwoods, stretching endlessly every direction. The forest is lifeless and alien, silently solemn. You make your way through the woods with the one who warmed you. He is very tall, and you adore him completely. Neither of you bother talking. You would like very much to look over to him and offer your hand. Instead you stare ahead and keep your hands behind your back.
A train whistles, ear-splittingly near. The whole world rattles.

I can't get off of this train. I must keep riding it.

You reach out to your friend, relieved to have him to share this journey with him.

But when you turn to look, he is changed.
"Behave," Fermet says, grabbing you by the chin as you struggle. His long hair brushes over your face, silky-soft.

He pours hot lye down your throat and you would scream if you had a voice to any longer. As you froth and vomit, Fermet hacks a butcher knife into your belly, swiftly without effort. At first it's too sharp and quick to really hurt, though the metal is quite cold. The blood and stomach acid spill from the wound, corroding the knife and your flesh.

The train whistles again. There are bloody handprints on the sky.

The walls of the world fall away with a clatter. You are in the glass box in the middle of the city. You never left - you should have known all along.

Your friend looks down on your from the glass, blue-gray gaze full of pity. His hand is so much bigger than yours when you trace its outline. How many years has it been since you cried? You watch the tear-distorted figure of your friend disappear into the crowd.

"Well," Fermet says, pressed against you, touching the small of your back. "I'm here for you."
A train whistles in the distance. It sounds like And me.

"I'd rather be alone," you reply, wishing loneliness could kill. "Leave me, leave me!"
You scream yourself awake. LEAVE ME!

The light must be playing tricks on you because the shadows keep shifting on the wall, turning into beckoning hands. They urge you to get up, to follow, to leave this place.

The darkness reminds you of that impossibility.

You are trapped in your own body, confined to the flesh.

At first everything just hurts. There's something warm running down your chin as you become aware of a distinct stiffness in your shoulders, but when you try to move them, you feel the coarse rope and the solid wood of the chair holding you. Surrounding you is dynamite, wrapped and bundled with care, but in the center is a timer with six seconds on it.



But the clock doesn't seem to move on its own. There's not even a tick or a beep, but you know that there's six seconds, even though just thinking about the time means it will run down.

Instead of struggling, though, your attention focuses on the dead bird in the grass before you, crimson spread out across the muted and burned ochre. It's body twists and contorts, bones snapping and skin pulling until bat-like features emerge. With its fanged mouth it croaks out, "Who killed the cocky Robin?"

You glance up from the foul thing to suddenly see your gravestone, the angel's arms bent into a prayerful position, wings spread wide. As you watch, though, the marble shifts and her arm points toward you.

"With his stupidity and uselessness, he killed himself."

But you can't respond, you can't fight, not as a cruel laughter rings out through the graveyard and the ground shifts to the right of you. Now you can walk, your binds freed, but the threat remaining. You can't run away, you can only crawl forward on your hands and knees toward your own grave. The name no longer remains on the stone, but you know it's yours and as you lean over the side of the grave, the coffin opens.



There it is. Your body at peace, eyes closed and hands folded across your chest. At least something is right.

However, the eyes snap open, blue and piercing as they stare up at you. "Why are you back?"

The voice is so much younger, so much brighter and higher, not only through biology but through an unloved strife, something changed you even after you stepped out of your own grave. You began to worship the same death and blood that you fought against. You're done wrong and you know it.

And you hear the tick of the timer. Five seconds.

You should be running, you should be escaping, but you can't move. Instead another shift of dirt to your left catches your attention. Another gravestone, another name wiped away. You don't deserve it.

"You should be rotting six feet under the ground." A skeleton, dressed in the Robin tunic and cape sits up and leans casually on the edge of the dirt. "No one cares about you, anyway."



And another second ticks off the clock. Four.

Both corpses don't stop there.



"You're dead."

"You failed."

You know it's true. You failed. Not then. Now. You went after your mother, then, you tried to save her. You died knowing you tried.

But now? What have you turned yourself into? A murderer, a killer, just like every dirtbag you've put down. As you finally try to get away as you crawl forward toward the dark woods surrounding the graveyard, a figure emerges from the mist, his cape flowing out from the darkness itself. The cowl. You know that cowl. Batman.

His message is simple, "You failed me.

And there's one more lanky figure emerging from the dark, green hair slicked back, a manic smile twisting his lips. The Joker. "Time to go back to sleep."

Batman doesn't stop him as he moves forward, crowbar raised. It cracks across your back, breaking more ribs as you fall back down, unable to protect yourself, unable to protect her, but where is she? Where's your mom? You know you tried to save her, you know you failed, but you tried. Your skull caves in, your lungs refuse to work, your bones break and shatter under the assault and you can smell your own blood spreading out across the dead grass. The time ticks down suddenly. Three. Two.



Breathing is difficult, but you still bring your head up. You can't plead as the crowbar cracks your jaw, sending teeth and blood flying from your mouth. Then there's a pause and you hope that he stopped the Joker, Batman did. He finally listened, he finally---

Batman seizes the front of your shirt and drags you across the grass toward a sudden, new grave, a coffin laid inside as you scream. As you beg. You'll be better. You'll do better. You'll stop.

It's too late. He throws you into the coffin and the lid slams over before you can even try to escape.

One second.

It's just you and your breath in the silence for a couple moments. You reach out for the fabric only a matter of inches in front of your face. You did this before, you can do it again. You can escape. Breathe. Stay calm. You can do this again. You'll explain. But then there's laughter, the same cruel laughter of before and you scream for him, push your lungs. Help me. Help me, Batman. Your nails tear against wood and earth as it sprays down on you but you're trying to hold your breath as you push upwards. You don't know how you got in here but you don't care, you're getting out, you're getting home. Tears pour down your cheeks as you scream. This can't be the end.

But as you push one breaking hand through the wood, the bottom of the coffin drops out and you fall. You're screaming. No. No. No you're not dead. You can't be.

You land in something soft, supple, pliant under your broken fingers. No, no, no. Then two gloved hands cover your eyes.

"No." The voice is deeper, more calloused with a darkness you know is growing in you.



"We will prove to him. With my way."

Surrounding him is a mass of corpses and you know he killed them. You know you killed them.

Zero seconds.

You wake up.

Rotting, shredding, the marrow in your bones feels hollowed out by some unseen force. It's been easy to ignore for the time being. You focus instead on the emptiness you feel otherwise, the floating and drifting. You could die here.

Perhaps that's what you really want.

The hands beckon.

Come away.

Mother is calling.

Isolation. A glint of silver here, the feel of cold metal beneath your hand there, and this intense sense of loss. You should be
somewhere-with someone-but you aren’t. Something about getting split up, about ending up somewhere else because someone was chasing you. And now there
splitting pain across your chest, the smell of blood and something else in the air-something thick and foul and it won’t go away. You fight, try to push away
from the pain, but you can’t.

Because you’re against something flat and cold with leather straps over your wrists as someone drags that earlier silver glint in an outline over your chest, slicing through skin like it’s nothing but butter. There’s muttering above you, quiet contemplation as hands work and inspect the insides-the heart, especially. Finally, there seems to be agreement. New pain, now, as everything is put back as it was, a needle taken to the skin to stitch it back together.

“Mark it as something to be observed.”

And yet more pain. Something digging into your face in an indistinguishable shape. Either way, it hurts and you want to scream out for your friend-the person you should be with-but instead something incomprehensible comes out. And no matter how much you scream, you still end up in a cold and impersonal little cell with the only light coming through a small, barred window on the door.

No matter what you do, you’re still alone.

The shadows glide out of the walls and across the floor, into your bed, beneath your sheets, over your body, and over your face. There's a crawling in your veins, in your blood, as the dark seeps into your flesh and into your eyes, your mouth, your nose--

You feel your heartbeat slow to a crawl.

And then...nothing.

It is disappointing to have that sense of failure, but it is absolutely heartbreaking to have that sense of abandonment. Emotions are a bothersome thing, you see, because they play like a double-edged sword to your overall character. It does not matter what you believe in, they always reveal the truth about what you think, what you feel, and what you should know.

That's why you put on a mask - and it's breaking.

( Your heart, it beats steadily. )

You breathe hard through your nose, your hands curls into fists because you're trying your best to do something, anything, to suppress those hurtful feelings. They burn like fire, however, and the heat spreads to every part of your body because you cannot control it. The feeling of wanting to rip off your flesh rises, the feeling of wanting to drop to your knees is tempting.

Perhaps, to feel better, one must distract themselves from the sorrow.

( Your heart, it beats so fast. )

It eats you alive, these feelings you feel. Eating sweet delicacies like chocolate does not help you smile, even when it melts in your mouth like a dream, even when you lick your fingers to clean it off like a child; rushing out the stress with a dance does not help you smile, even when you spin with vigor to release all the negative energy, even when you tighten your grip around the faceless partner's hip.

It doesn't work.

( Your heart, it stops. )

Because she's gone, because she calls you a coward, nothing matters anymore.

There is laughter echoing in the dark. Quiet tittering follows from the halls, bouncing off the walls and into the room.

You sit up.

You can move. You are free. You slide out of your coffin bed and move.

You step forward.

You walk.

The door opens.

Your eyes are closed, but you know you're wearing red. It's loose around your arms, sliding down your shoulders, and your collar bone feels sore, feels bitten. Already you know that this shouldn't be real, because you shouldn't be wearing red; you've given up that color. I must be asleep, you tell yourself. Is he letting me dream tonight? Did I do something- But you can't decide whether it's 'right' or 'wrong' you should be saying. You pull blankets onto yourself, and know immediately that you shouldn't have. What are you doing? asks Father angrily, and you lie, I was cold, because you're so far away. It works. He's over you and you suppose you'll never be cold again, but as dreams go, something changes without the change really registering: Father isn't warm over you any longer. He's awfully cold; he feels like dough left out too long. He's too large and his belly is going to bruise your hips, and you throw your arms around him, murmuring false adoration so that he'll leave you alone. This isn't right. He was supposed to leave you alone years ago.

And you open your eyes and see that he's definitely dead, blue-lipped, purple-cheeked. It's disgusting. It's horrifying, and you can't help yourself: you shriek, mouth and eyes gone wide, and your hands push out in front of yourself - you're trying to shove Father away, you're wanting to wake up, because it can't be real. Father is dead and gone and rotting away in his silk-lined box in the dirt. You were there; you wept over his coffin, throwing yourself into hysterics for good measure, but here he is with saliva on his chin and something mocking in his pale eyes. You have never told Father no before, not in any of the hundreds of times you've wanted to, but you do now. You tell him no with your screaming mouth and your flailing hands, and then you gasp and scream more loudly, because your fingers have torn through his decomposing cheeks, through yielding flesh. You can feel his teeth. Your hands jerk back and you only just keep from pressing them to your mouth in terror. Come here, pretty, grumbles Father with a loose tongue, as if he doesn't notice. You've gone into wailing, even worse, and you wriggle, working your way out from underneath him, and he's breaking atop you and it feels like grease and slime and the flat of his tongue spread over your entire self. You tell him no, you shout it, making up for all the times you never have-

Then you fall out of bed and it hurts and then you know you're awake, with no Father over you, with no rotty blood seeping under your finger nails.

With one side of your shoulder against a bedside dresser, you lay sprawled, propped up on your elbows, breathing too heavily. The sweat at your forehead is cold, but you don't know whether you're shivering from a chill or from nausea. You're breathing too heavily, gasping it in, and it makes your throat hurt, but at least you know you'd only imagined it all.

Directly after you're bleeding from the abdomen - again? have you done this before? - and you're clutching yourself and spiders crawl out through your fingers, riding the tide of blood, and you're sure you'll never stop dry heaving like you've suddenly started to, and looking at the spiders, you apologize fiercely, too frightened, and the spiders chew on your hands. They say: "Distasteful," and you're crying very hard now. "But I love you," you say, and something with yellow eyes takes your hands and eats them, and you hate that you've woken up from Father to this.

And then you wake up for real.

The eyes persist on seeing what you do, blinking along the long hallways of white you walk through. The walls expand, contract, doors opening like the gaping and widening jaws of a hungry beast.

But there is a willingness in your step as you walk into them and let the teeth snap shut on you.

There is freedom here.

You flew once into the abyss of the water and the dark. It's time to do so again.

You have been doing nothing out of the ordinary course which is why you're not sure why you're remembering this all of a sudden. Normally there's no part of you that can remember, that isn't trapped in the perpetual present, but here you are suddenly remembering what happened one second ago. Two seconds ago; three. That's right, some kind of evocation has brought you up and you are uncomfortably hot, yet almost naked. The air is chilly but you're still burning hot, and this clammy humid discomfort sends something like a deep discomfort spreading through your completely functional limbs. There is nothing wrong with your body, but it's attracting your attention as if it were throbbing madly, as if a thick mat of blood was a snarl trying to seep out of you. Inside that thick mat is a tangle of various bloods; dried blood, the kind that melts into dirt as time goes by; brightly pumping warm hot blood, that feels vaguely sacrilegious and yet exciting to touch because it should be inside; strings of it like a sweater, tangled into a mottled clot, and a horrifying-dizzying quiet pool, simmering, steaming blood. Blood that is turning into a hot steam with an acrid stench of iron and stinging your eyes and goading you on to just rip it out of yourself...

It's like an itch that you can't forget while you register the strange starlit background around you and the flat open seemingly-atmosphere-free platforms that are utterly silent. And the strange creatures, birds to the eye, black birds with red eyes that follow you around while you try to get your mind off that itch, and then they start to whisper in a child's voice, Turn back, turn back! Turn back. Stay inside, they say. Stay inside or she'll come back. But you can't; you have to let it out, damned itch, and there isn't anything else to do, and the world is swimming in frustration, like the feeling when you get lost in a video game, there's nothing to do except listen to the maddening baby voice of Turn back, stay inside and resist the urge to let that snarl of a hundred bloods out, even a little bit.

But now there's something new, another voice joining in, a voice telling you that you have been trapped here forever, actually. You have never had any purpose. Suddenly memory illuminates your mind like a fluorescent light and the room is empty, completely bare.

You have been locked inside alone for eighteen years with the birds and the itch and the blood and the stars. And the maddening irrational horror of dripping blood, itching blood, needs to be stopped, needs to be destroyed... You have to get out. You have to let it out, and you start scratching and stabbing and tearing at the tangled clot of blood that is on yourself, keeping even more blood and rage inside you, rending and lashing yourself to spill open all the rage of fury that has stretched on for eighteen years here, vistas of thousands of years before now, alone and trapped and filled.

Where are you going?

A wraith stands in the doorway, dark ivy winding up its arms, its skin branded in markings and burns. Dark hair conceals its face but there is a mild hint of razored teeth.

"It's time to go," you say.

It titters and edges to the side, slinking up to you. Its small hands creep up your arms.

Take me with you.

And all of a sudden you find yourself back in the before place. It's quiet, white, not a soul around. In the before place, with it’s white walls and soft textures, you know you're safe. You remember what it was like when you were at peace, and your biggest worry was how to entertain yourself for the evening. Way back when it used to be so easy.

In the before place, your thoughts are short. Small. They don't have to be anything else. Nothing bigger than you, yourself, are supposed to be in any case. There's no preconception, no insinuation, no assumptions. It's simple. Clean. And you like it that way.

You remember the before place being so comfortable. So soft. So accommodating.

You also remember what happened to it.

You remember the stink and rust that crawled it's way across the walls and floor, and the blood that began to pour through the cracks in the plaster. You remember the way it smelled, leaving the sharp scent of copper on your tongue while it drip, drip, dripped against your skin. You remember how the pristine walls were stained black. Trembling fingers brush against them and the color rubs off on to you. It’s coal.

It makes you dirty.

There are voices talking in this abstract state. Voices that you can't quite understand. They're just too far away to make out, but you know they're talking about you. Maybe they're even talking to you and you just don't listen well enough. That was always your problem. You could never listen well enough. You could never do it right. You could never do anything right.

The floor drops out beneath you and you fall with a startled yell, bits of wood and tile clattering against the metal grate you land on. Groaning, you pull yourself back up and look around. The hole you came through is gone, leaving a solid ceiling in it's wake. Blood is everywhere now, soaking your clothes and spattering across your face in a fine mist. Some of it gets in your mouth and you know. You know that you made all this blood come pouring out.

No. That’s impossible. You'd never hurt anyone. You swear.

"What about us?" They ask, muffled questions coming from behind the drywall.

"What?"

"Did you forget?" They taunt.

"I don't understand."

But before you ever have a chance to investigate, a force much bigger than yourself sweeps up from behind and grabs you. There is a violent struggle but you’re no match for him, and he pins you to an old filing cabinet - binding your arms and legs with razor wire. A single dirty light bulb illuminates the space, and though it is behind his head - silhouetting his face, you can make out a set of familiar features. They’re yours.
Your shadow self leans in over you with a twisted smile, his eyes black and without mercy. He presses a knife to your throat and whispers,

"What about them, Tom?"

Behind him, the chorus in the walls echo: "What about us, what about us?"

The crumbling walls fall away like chunks of flesh, and embedded in the wet mass are the mangled faces of everyone you’ve ever hurt - Looking on with dead eyes and cheeks swollen with maggots.

"Why did you do it?" Rochelle asks, hair slick against her face.

"Why? Why? Why?" They chime in, faces contorting as they rasp each and every word.

"You thought they would forget?" Your double asks. You try to look away but he holds your chin and forces you to see.

Hands of rotting flesh rise up, trying to ensnare you with their putrid fingers. The cabinet is gone and Peter falls foreword against you, wrapping his sick arms around your neck and pulling his half-face against your cheek.

"You did this." He cries, rancid breath poisoning your lungs as his dried tongue clicks against his teeth. Peeling lips rear back with yellow pearls and they click, click, click.

Frightened, repulsed, you lean as far back against the wall as you can, but you're trapped by the bodies of your victims.

"Why, Why, Why?"

"I--I don't know." You stammer hopelessly. "It wasn't me. I didn't--I wouldn't!"

Behind the blood in the wall, a new form takes shape. Slowly at first as it rises through the wriggling flesh and maggots. Faceless. Soulless. A light, dim at first, emanates from the figure's forehead and as the flesh drips off, you can see the all too familiar mask. He doesn't move for a moment, drawing the gore up around him, pulling the limbs and bodies and broken chests back as if they were his mantle. They scream, faces twisting into ghoulish monsters but have no power of their own.

And you feel guilty. You feel so guilty you want to die. The man comes closer now, drawing up to his full height. Impossibly tall, he slowly lumbers toward you - dragging his large axe behind him with each thundering step. The light from his helmet is blinding, but you manage to shade your eyes and, against your better judgments, look up.

Harry stands above you, chest and shoulders bare and slick of blood. The mask has melted against his skin, twisting, growing, corroding into some kind helmet. What's left of his jump suit has been shredded and tied around his waist, long strips of fabric knotted in with - Oh Jesus, you realize - its skin.

You're going to be sick.

He takes one final step and shifts in front of you, raising his heavy pickaxe and smashing it down--

--you roll to the side, but just barely escape--

--and he finds you on his second swing.

The blade pierces through your chest but yields no blood. Only smoke.

"This is who you are." Your shadow laughs and holds you to the ground.

"This is who you’ll always be."

Its breath is putrid; ivy licks along your skin and drags you up close. The smile on its face is obvious, brushing against your skin. You push it away and into the stairs. There is an echo in the halls and the floor falls away. The stairwell becomes a mouth, greedy and beckoning.

"Don't touch me."

It cackles and circles you, smiling. It reaches out its hands to you. Set me free.

"No. No. No, go away, go away, leave me alone--"

Release me.

You push it. It falls with a heavy cry into the great maw of the abyss, swallowed up.

Its shrieks ring in your ears.

They sound like your own voice, screaming.

The putrid smell of burning flesh, soot and grime and rusted metal and something that there is no description for reaches your nose. It might remind you a little of the smell the wafts through the night in Siren’s Port, but a thousand times worse. Nothing that you would smell on an earthly plane. And nothing you would hear. Shrieks and cries and sobs melding into a mass of ambient noise are enough to make your ears ache and bleed.

You can’t move, bonds you cannot see tie down your body and you are stripped nude, vulnerable to the heat and hungry eyes of your captors. Your flesh boils all over, bubbling in places and bursting before healing back over just so a blade or a spike or a saw can reopen your flesh. The fibers of your muscles are torn apart and pulled in strips just as pieces of your skin was before and tossed away like shreds of paper.

Your abuser has no face for the moment and it doesn’t even matter what he looks like since all you know is the pain of your body being torn, burned and slowly stripped like a pig ready for slaughter. You scream and scream until your voice is hoarse and all you want to do is pass out. If this were an earthly plane, you probably would have passed out by now, but something is keeping you conscious through the hours of agony.

You’re dripping blood and missing pieces of muscle and bone and some of your organs were showed to you, some of them force-fed back down your throat. As you are forced to chew on your own liver and swallow the bile that keeps rising from your stomach at the horror of it, suffocating on your body’s acid juices, your abuser has somehow spun you upside-down. The rack you’re strapped to must be rigged in that way.

It’s an even more vulnerable position to be in than before, still nude with muscle and organ and bone exposed to the scorching and corrosive atmosphere. Your legs are splayed like your arms and the most sensitive areas of your body are out there in the open to be toyed with and violated. And that’s what is done, searing metal melts you from the inside over and over, your lower intestines giving out under the repetitive abuse.

Then the metal prod finally sears it’s way through your navel and blood and pieces of your insides rush down and out through your mouth and you once again struggle to breathe as they continue to violate you in different ways, not always using a tool. Then it’s hours later that you’re flipped back to an upright position and your abuser gets close and touches you in a different kind of violation with his proximity, hands roaming and asking if you’d enjoyed that. You know, when the searing prod wasn’t destroying you from the inside out. There were times when it felt good, weren’t there? And you’re so dazed and disgusted with it all that you don’t answer.

But then the grotesque face just takes it in stride and continues again to pick and tear your body apart. And then it’s another bunch of hours pass before he asks another question. A question you’d already heard and took all your might and willpower to answer. With that answer, your punishments get more painful and creative every time and you try not to wonder to yourself why you don’t just give them what they want.

The earth begins to shake beneath your feet, the ceramic tile falling away. The darkness reaches up to grab your ankles and drag you down, down into the mouth of the beast. The building becomes a monster itself, one cracked with rust and blood, smelling of raw flesh and bone.

Lights flicker in the black emptiness of its mouth, blinking.

Those aren't lights.

They're eyes.

You scream as you're swallowed up.