Page 9 of Altar of Flesh

Friction. Blissful, sudden friction. Next to the demon’s enormous foot, my cock was barely noticeable. My pale skin pulsed and rutted up against its jet-black flesh. With near careless energy, it rubbed my poor swollen cock, bringing its pace in line with the imps, who fucked tirelessly into me, and it was about then that I lost time—or lost the ability to register much else except pleasure.

I could not tell you if anything else happened. My eyes rolled to the back of my skull and my body reached a point of luscious,indescribable feeling. Warmth, pleasure, an ecstasy that jolted my soul from the flesh itself, or an ecstasy that rendered my soul to nothing but my body—I couldn’t be sure, except that when the orgasm came, it was nearly violent.

I cried out, my voice screaming through the air, and I kept thrusting up against Malphas’ foot long after the initial shock had plundered me. Even as it began to ache, the feeling too much, too overwhelming, I kept rutting. I don’t know how long I moaned and thrust forward. I don’t know how long I kept moving.

All I know is, by the time I had recovered, and throes of pleasure had ebbed away enough for me to regain a sense of stability and consciousness, all the imps had disappeared.

I could still feel the ache in my body, the way my hole throbbed around nothingness, open to the world. My cock lay flaccid and spent over my thigh, and above me, Malphas watched as if it had never moved.

Malphas said, “Thee has’t proven yourself, as mine own L’rd commanded of me. Thee art worthy of becoming a plaything f’r the Prince himself. Wend on, dram lamb, blasphemous priest. Alloweth yourself be fucked again and again until Asmodeus opens his door to thee.”

And like that, a door appeared. I turned, still splayed on the ground, as stone rumbled and between the black cliff spawned a slither of light. It was my passage forward.

When I turned back to Malphas, the demon was gone.

6

CHAPTER SIX

In the tenebrous dark of that place, I let myself recover. For minutes, my mind felt apart from my body, still spinning above the vessel of my flesh with pleasure.

When it finally settled back into me, I found it difficult to move. My body ached with overuse, and as I pushed up, hand sliding in the wet mess pooling on the stone, my arm shook with the effort.

Sitting upright only made the exhaustion more obvious. Gravity urged me back down, and I had to fight the desire to sleep. I did not know how long the door would remain open, and so I hastily pushed myself up and began the walk over to it.

My feet, wet with fluids, slapped awkwardly along the stone. Wind blew through the tower, and I shivered in the cold breeze of it, mind still fogged with lush pleasure. In this sense, very few thoughts formed in my head—nothing coherent, nothing that said, ‘Go here’ or ‘Do this’. I simply found myself pressing the palms of my hands against the jagged black stone, gliding my skin over the uneven texture beneath. It reminded me of the Cave of the Sibyl in some respect, namely the dank scent, thick with old, undisturbed earth and wet soil. My hands came awayslightly damp, too, as something akin to water glistened over the walls.

The passage was barely wide enough for me to walk down front on. I would have to turn to the side and shimmy through it. If it weren’t for the light at the end, which glowed a warm and inviting orange, I might have been scared—but I was beyond that feeling surely.

I turned my body and pushed down that toothed corridor. The instant my body was inside, the end I had entered from rumbled closed, and the resounding boom throbbed down my body and through the cramped space. My breathing went erratic instantly—not out of any conscious fear, but like a response from my body, which cowered at the mounting pressure building in my chest and lungs and the ever-present fear that I would somehow be crushed.

Do not be foolish, I thought, but that did nothing to relax me. In times like this, in the past, I would have prayed. My tongue went thick with that knowledge. I had no other way to cope, no practised method, and no knowledge of how to centre myself without the presence of God. And so I fell into old habits, with a new subject to laud.

Asmodeus, I thought. I prayed.I come to you. Protect me.

There was no answer. My heart sank, most likely because the demon had answered before. God never had, of course, but knowing Asmodeuscouldhear me,couldreply, and for whatever reason chose not to—it made my heart hurt.

I kept moving, squeezing down that stone passage. The skin on my stomach and upper back gave way, sliced open by stone shaped at odd angles. I barely registered the pain, but warm blood ran in thin trickles down my body, my spine, my thigh; a terrible lubricant that did little to make the journey any slicker for me. All the while, I was coaxed towards the other end by that inviting warm light.

Come to me.

I heard Asmodeus, then, faintly. Like a cautious whisper carried by the wind, like it didn’t quite want to say it,come to me, sounding more like a desire than an order for me to fulfil. I stopped in the cramped tunnel and closed my eyes, inhaling deeply that scent of petrichor and depth.

Soon, I told my prince.I will be there soon. In my mind’s eye, I conjured that hierarchy the lesser demons had spoken to me about. I had passed the trials of the President of Hell, and so next was the Knight of this realm. I waited tensely for some kind of approval, some kind of acknowledgement, but nothing came. When I opened my eyes, I had to wonder if I had heard Asmodeus at all or just the whisper of my desperation echoing in my head.

I pressed on. For minutes, I pushed and scraped my naked body through the passage, and finally, when I reached the end and was roughly expelled out the other side, I breathed as deeply as I could and half collapsed onto the ground.

My fingers sank into warm, dry soil. I spent a minute deliberately not looking anywhere but my hands, at the way my fingers pressed and disappeared beneath the particles. The earth smelled fresh and upturned andgreenthe way much of Italy did in the summer. I shivered and gained the strength to look up.

This part of Asmodeus’ domain stretched to the horizon, an open plain dotted with dry brush tinged red as if stained by blood. I felt like I might run for hours and never reach the end of the field; in fact, I felt certain that would be what happened. The red sun and that impassable expanse of fields would drive me mad. Almost stubbornly, I stayed rooted to the ground, where my hands and bare feet could sink into the grassless soil, and I could be sure I was touching solid ground. Something about the way the grass swayed made me dizzy like it was an ocean stretching before me, not grass.

Like that, dog-like on all fours, I moved sideways, hoping to get a better lay of the land. When nothing more revealed itself to me, I gingerly stood. I had been hoping for a vantage point, as had existed in Malphas’ territory, a ledge where I could see where I was meant to go. Instead, all I had was the strangely red grass and my human fear, an instinct telling me:do not touch.

I think it was out of instinct that I went down onto my knees as if in prayer. It was something I knew how to do and something that inspired in me a kind of certainty, the sense that I was doing something productive. I prayed for direction, a way to fulfil my purpose, which I held proudly in my heart.

Let me go to Asmodeus,my Prince of Lust, I begged, either to Asmodeus itself or some mighty power in Hell, or perhaps I was appealing to my own instincts to comprehend what I was supposed to do next. I needed a Knight of Hell, a rank I knew very little about.

When I opened my eyes, a path of pure black soil had emerged in the sea of grass. Inevitably, I thought of Moses as I stood and stepped into the bare soil, my feet gliding through upturned roots and loose dirt. I was careful not to touch the swaying edges of the grass, for I did not know what would become of me if I did.

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