Into the Nightmare

[Okor]

A rumbling, low chuckle answered Mercer’s dire warning. Jowls long since divorced from the flesh and bone beneath flapped as festering fangs bared themselves in a gangrenous grin. ”Look at me, dreamer. Do you think this is the face of a man who would stand against such a thing?” The rotting flesh barely adhered to the abomination began to liquefy, running down to the aether beneath them as the erratic amalgamation of bone beneath was bared, hundreds of skeletons entwined together in a macabre embrace to form this carrion-creature. ”Does it look like something that still deserves to be called a man?”

Claws dug into the etherium that forged this nightmare, skeletal talons sinking themselves deep into madness. The dream was falling apart, descending into irrationality as the Dreamer’s minds turned against themselves. Smouldering green flame coalesced in the cyclopean skull’s empty socket as the invader spoke.

”Your mind is a strange and splintered place, Dreamer. You war against your own self, torn between your blessings and your own desires.”

The sepechural skeleton loomed over the warring personalities, hungering instinct matched against the morals of a man. It was an age-old struggle, the nature of humanity being to deny it, to quiet the beast within and to look down upon the strange and savage, thinking themselves above it.

But that was not the path Okor trode: the filth, the disease, the festering cesspit that was humanity, he embraced it all. And here it was; a broken, maddened man at war with what he had become. This was his flock, the lost and the damned bereft of guidance, of purpose, of hope.

What kind of Believer would he be if he did not extend a helping claw to those in need?

Boiling blood bubbled out from a bony jaw, streams of translucent vitae pouring down his calciferous chin as the carrion bird’s claws met the man’s muscles, fists pitted against a cruelly hooked beak.

”Pale Blood will guide your way, dreamer,” pronounced Okor as the two cohabitants of Mercer’s mutated body continued their eternal struggle. ”You will embrace your changes, or be… consumed.”

The corpse-construct froze in place, a rictus grin etching itself upon its visage as a seemingly endless tide of tainted blood flowed from its maw, a mere pittance of the sanguine streams shed by Mercer and his contagion.

The Prophet had done his work here. Another gamepiece of the Gods had been forced upon the board, and none could predict just what tale Omni would tell with his latest prisoner.

The ethereal form of Okor slipped through the skeins of reality that entrapped this pocket dimension of madness and death, returning to the Astral Realm, continuing to spread his corruption with each step in this sacred ‘verse.