Daughter of Suffering

July 27, 2023

She dropped the box as the last slide clicked into place and the lights went out. She could hear the clicking, whirling sounds of the box in the dark, and she scrambled to her knees, hands blindly searching the ground around her for it. The words of the old homeless man that sold her the puzzle box echoed through her head, "It's yours...it always was;" she couldn't make out the last few words he mumbled, but she could of sworn he had mentioned it being needed for consent before ducking out of sight through the alleyway.

A sudden light burned her eyes, and she let out a yelp as she raised her hand to cover them. In the far distance, she could make out the hollow ringing of a church bell, although she did not recall any churches near her domicile. The clanging of chains filled the din, and as her eyes adjusted, she could see the walls of her bedroom fold and waver, as if being turned and rotated to open into a macabre passageway. On the floor far outside her reach, lay the puzzle box shimmering in the broken and flashing lights coming from the new opening that just appeared; the box seemed as if it were slithering closer to it.

Nausea washed over her as the arid wind spilling from the portal whipped around her, carrying the rancid smell of rotted meats; she clapped hands over ears, vainly trying to cancel out the wretched sound of thousands, if not millions, of maggots doing their job: breaking down and devouring waste and parts of the body Death left behind. Stomach bile shot out of her mouth, spilling over a quivering lip to d*** from her chin like a waterfall, splashing to her chest and lap below. Long, thin shadows moved erratically, reaching from the dismal glow of the doorway, making it tough for her to get her wits about her. Composure drained from her as the puddle of warm liquid pooled around her trembling, sweat covered form causing clothing to cling to her uncomfortably; she fought the instinct to peel the offensive fabric from her skin, ***ing it the final bastion of her modest innocence - dirty and tattered as it was.

As if being dropped into the Void, she was suddenly submerged in the abysmal darkness of a lumbering shadow rising before her. The ground quaked beneath her as immense boots stepped to attention yards away, black leather stretched over steel toes now the backdrop for the forgotten gilded cube. Though she tried, the illumination from the archway the beast had emerged from cast a halo around it, all she could make out was an enormous shadowy frame, almost rectangular in shape with what appeared to be tall, thin spikes protruding upward from its back at odd angles. Flat disks adorn the tips of the spikes, precariously balanced. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the sickly scene, scanning the monstrous specter for any detail that might help clear the fog from her bewildered mind.

Sudden and deafening tapping echoed the room, and a scream slipped from her throat in surprise. From within the obfuscated shape, something stirred to her shrill outburst; slight sparks began dancing from the back of what she could only consider a "head" as it shook erratically. Once stopped, large black pupils fixed on the girl trembling before the creature. That cold, dead gaze chilled her to her very core, and her nipples stiffened; sweat soaked and puke stained, the simple shirt afforded her no modesty.

Eyes adjusting slowly, she noticed the sparks coincided with the tapping, and the faster they pounded away at her eardrums, the larger the shower of sparks that rained down over a slender torso adorn in scars like tears in old, dusty parchment. Hung from broad shoulders, a thick metal frame boxed the creature's ghastly form, covering its back with sinewy wings that the spikes tore through; the disgusting appendages did not appear to be intended for flight, as much as, shroud the beast in a perpetual darkness. The patter at a constant and grave tempo caused a glow to shine from behind its head, casting a shadow of the human skull against the papyrus skin of its face with inkwell eyes relentlessly staring. Long, saliva-slick tongue licked at cracked and chapped lips with a perverse lewdness that caused her stomach to turn.

Swift and abrupt, it extended gangly arms, impossible in length, shooting to either side of the startled girl, mouth agape in shock. The creature's hands fell just short of being able to grab her, and this close, her eyes were able to study them as they stopped midair and motionless mere inches away. The arms were bone thin with a patchwork of gleaming black leather and pale skin with angry scratches and pus-filled sores, while the hands looked comically large at the end of such skinny arms. The palms seemed extremely rough with cuts and callouses, little black dots staining at various places. Twisted, bony fingers sprawled beyond the palms as if poised to strike at the girl's face; the tips of its fingers had been ground to the bone, and shiny, elaborate silver fountain pen nibs crowned the top of each. Black ooze drizzled from the tips, flumping to the floor with a wet splat.

Perhaps it was just the intense *** playing with her head or maybe her mind had just finally snapped at the macabre scene, but she could have sworn the puddles of pitch moved. Just a subtle wiggle at first, but the more she stared at the globules, the closer they maundered to the space in which she sat frozen in stark disbelief. Tiny, twitching hairs sprouted as the dark bubbles approached her legs on both sides; as the hairs got close to touching her, the blobs flattened and coalesced beneath her. Leaping to her feet in escape, the smirch was already crawling up her soles and quickly filled the shoe with the icy black fluid. She struggled to move, but found it quite impossible to budge her feet, that darkest ink had swallowed them both and gradually crept up her calves.

A shriek drowned out the tapping briefly as the realization of her situation made her brain explode. The momentum of her movement twisted her body like a broken ballerina, trapped eternal in freefall. The freezing liquid slithering its trespass into her shorts and panties, the fabric deteriorating as the splotch fumbled over her groin with lascivious hunger and then repeated the process up her chest with the shirt; her unexpected nudity barely bothered her as the foul liquid squirmed over her face, trying to invade her various orifices and yanking at her hair and forcing a ***ful back bend of her spine. She clawed at the substance slipping into her mouth without remorse, trying to ignore the agonizing and humiliating *** of her tender pussy and unprepared anus.

After rudely exploring her entire body, the viscous seepage wiggled like long, thin worms across her flesh and gathered at her wrists and ankles; sledge traced the journey running the length of her arms, along her spine, and down her legs in bold scrawlings that left the majority of her skin exposed to any and all eyes. The tapping intensified, speeding to a near maddening rate which threw the abomination into a fit, slapping its palms against the ground and making the room quake. A chasm split the floor behind the place she was trapped, spilling more of the black fluid carrying rusty gears and thick cogs that shuffled about as if being built into some disturbing contraption of sinister use. The stain over her flesh solidified, pulling her arms out to each side, forcing her chest out and causing her bones to creak. The liquid ick splayed her thighs, hooking a bulbous appendage into her bowels, shooting searing *** throughout her body as it lifted her off the ground, crucified for the monster's scrutiny.

Leaning against its palms, the creature hovered over the captured prey, sobbing and thrashing against the binds despite the effort rewarded with only her arms and torso being yanked taut. It contorted its neck so that the face was mere inches away from her, licking the side of her tear stained face with a sloppy wet tongue covered in uncountable piercings and leaving spittle behind to drip from her cheek. Continuing downward with its study of her flesh, she managed to see behind that terrible face: the upper rear of its skull had been removed, and where squishy gray matter should have been, the empty cavity was filled with type bars frantically banging at some dark thing deeper in its head, sparks erupting at each character struck. The miscreant had used its obscene tongue as much as those cold, dead eyes, but once the inspection was concluded, it hoisted over the girl's restrained form, peering down at the martyr in seething disdain.

Broken lips split and bled as they twisted into a sneering grin with crooked and jagged teeth, and the monster retracted its right hand back to its frame, loudly dragging it across the ground in the process. The left lifted from the floor slowly, gaunt fingers gradually balling into a fist as it raised over her head; boney index finger extended towards the girl's brow until the tip of the nib touched the center of her forehead, leaving behind a black ink spot. *** wracked her body, shooting spasms throughout her limbs, back arched and thrashing against the thin, evil cross. Head flung back, she bellowed as the splotch clawed its way into her flesh, her eyeballs filled with the same obsidian as the creature and a shadow passed over her agonizing form. Once the fit passed, her head fell forward limp and drool spilled from her mouth in lengthy tendrils of spit.

Serenity is short lived in hell, and even as she fought to regain her senses, she became distracted by an abrupt spasm in her lower right leg. A yelp escaped her throat as a small, sharp punch struck the outer side of her calf muscle, as if something inside her was trying to slice through her. Straining to see, a protrusion appeared in her skin and as her eyes cleared, she could make out the letter "P", *** filling the type print like sanguine ink against pale flesh. She grit her teeth together tightly, biting her tongue in the process, as character after character impacted her calf and continued across her shin; the monster raised upright to better regard the crimson word now typed across her leg: "Prologue".

A low, guttural chuckle, not unlike that of a hyena with a maw full of torn and visceral meat, erupted from the creature as the typing continued. Though, as awareness of the fable being etched into her flesh bloomed into thought, she found the unending assault frighteningly arousing, her cunt slick and lubricious with the imagery of experience scored on her dermis. Even as that "page" ended, another began elsewhere; letters became words became sentences written across the titmeat of her left breast - the second paragraph crossed over sensitive areola and slammed the nipple cruelly. Unphased, she grinded her hips lasciviously, moaning the psalms of sinful release and earthly euphoria.

Basking in perverse glee, the creature lifted its heavy hands overhead, reaching to the spikes on its back; pressing its palm down on the affixed disk, the monster used them like the keys on a typewriter, the depression causing an explosion of sparks from its cranium. The keystroke cast, the mechanism cranked to life behind the crucifix, toothed wheels spinning and clicking in the black ooze. Extending from the substance, the hairs quivered and grew, some evolving into what resembled the barbed, spindly legs of a cockroach reaching out to her body. A set of the segmented appendages navigated towards the wound on her calf in twitchy, insect-like movements; small, hook shaped razors jutted from the tarsus, and with just a few quick slices, cut a rectangle around the composition typed upon on her skin.

Filamentous arms snuck into action next, picking and pulling at the corners and edges of the fresh laceration. Her howls drowned out the constant typing as the fine limbs threaded themselves under the flesh, leisurely peeling it away from muscle tissue with a wet suction sound and freeing it from her form as if a grotesque sheet of paper. The quivering hairs reverently carried the removed corium to a spot before her, gingerly lying it on the ground as in offering to some depraved god. The abomination pressed another key on its back, starting the process again at her breast; even as the page on her tit was being cut free, the epidermis began to develop in the missing space on her lower leg, young nerve bundles bursting to life in exquisite agony and causing the girl's sobbing renewed.

Head thrown back in the throes of having places on her body flayed - one page at a time, she noticed a man emerge from the flickering shadows bouncing around the room, standing upside-down on the ceiling. His appalling stature, d***d in gleaming leather and rusty chains adorn with gutting knives that whispered a disharmonious chime as he moved, she was sure he must be a figment of her distressed and corrupted imagination; she stared wildly in disbelief as the phantom came to rest over the puzzle box, and now knew she mad from the continued battery, but the alabaster flesh of his head was covered in shimmering nails set in an intricate diamond pattern over his face and skull. *** from her tongue gathered in the corners of her mouth, trickling up her cheek and stinging her eye. She tried to shake it from her vision of what certainly must be a demon from her psyche, finally coming to rip her sanity to shreds. He raised a languid hand to his leather-clad chest, palm turned toward the floor, and the box promptly fell into it as if it had lusted to be there all along.

"Despair," he stretched the word as smoke bellowed from his mouth, darkest eyes studying the glimmering cube, "I am the lord, the god of all flesh...let they whom look upon me weep and be cleansed by the lamentations of the most carnal awareness." He turned his cold gaze to the girl, causing her to tremble deep within her soul. As the Hell Priest approached, the apparatus behind her lurched and extended closer to him, and she realized that it was she that was actually upside-down: crucified on an inverted cross. Near face-to-face, he continued his sermon, "Sadist and masochist...author and muse...whatsoever one cruel and deviant mind may conceive, so be it visited upon your flesh," he smiled wide and grim to punctuate her sacrifice. "A thousand indignities...a lifetime of ***...an eon of ***...all recorded in your flesh for others to bear witness; and in this act, you will birth MY bible." He raised the puzzle box to her whimpering face, now decorated with a chapter, "To convert the masses to me with an eternity of ***."

In her exasperation, she could only croak out a solitary word: "Amen." Then, she kissed the cube lovingly.

"You will be our sacrificial lamb," his voice filled her with arousal and dread, as he ***d the box into her screaming mouth, breaking and cracking several of her teeth in the process. "They may have their bastard son of salvation; you will be the daughter of suffering...for all time everlasting..."

(Special thanks to Clive Barker for the Lament Configuration.)