Into The Abyss (Demons of Astlan) (3 page)

The world blinked.  Slowly.  Sort of like a Broadway play where the lights fade out on one scene and then fade back in on another, say on a different part of the stage.  Except, Tom was at the center of the lighting and it was the world that faded out and back in again.  He was still on his hands and knees on stone: rough, raw, natural stone, not stone flagging like in the room with the psychos.

He was dizzy.  He needed to catch his breath; except that, he just realized, he wasn’t breathing!  Tom quickly inhaled.  Hot, dry, very dry air filled his lungs and he breathed out again.  He wrinkled his nose the smell of rotten eggs in the air; was that sulfur?  Shit, he wasn’t breathing again!  He forced himself to breathe again; if he didn’t think about it, he didn’t breathe!  Well that would make life difficult!  How was he going to sleep?

The next thing Tom noticed was a huge cliff to his left and a stone
cliff wall to his right.  A curved stone cliff for that matter.   The ledge was curving around a stone cliff. He looked up…and up…OK that went up dizzyingly high; and it was cylindrical.  He glanced over the edge to his left.  He pulled his head back quickly.  The drop was every bit as bad downwards as upwards.  He thought he saw ground below, but there were clouds, dark grey clouds, below him, and flames.  Fire?  The ground below seemed to have molten lava on it and jets of flame that were shooting up hundreds if not thousands of feet in the air. 

Whoosh!  Went a loud noise off to his left; he turned his head to see a ball of fire expanding into the thin air and then contracting and disappearing.  As he looked
around, he saw other fireballs expanding and contracting randomly out of nothing.  What the hell?

Hell?  Fire, lava, flames, sulfur?  Was he dead and gone to hell?  Tom felt light headed.  He must have forgotten to breathe again.  He resumed breathing; he tried to breathe through his mouth to avoid the nasty stench in the air.

Tom shook his head and stood up.  Or rather, he tried to stand up; he had to catch his balance on the stone column beside him.  He was a bit unsteady.  He looked down at his legs.  Oh shit!  They were the same legs he’d had in the room with the psychos!  Hooves, he fucking had hooves!  Like a goat!   Concentrating on his feet, it felt like he was standing on his toes, but his toes were cloven hooves!  He had like two toes on each foot and they were all nail!  Or, mostly all nail, he closed his eyes to try to feel them; tapping his toes on the stone.

No, he had
toes; it was just that what felt like his toenails surrounded each of his toes.  He wasn’t standing on his toes, he was standing on his toe nails!  That was weird.  He looked down again, so what looked like his ankles were really the balls of his feet.  His feet felt weird, he flexed and twisted them.  It seemed as if there were a lot fewer bones and tendons in his foot.  That would make sense with only two toes.  His hooves were probably eight inches in diameter, huge!  His foot was nearly as big around, but it was at least two feet long and since he was standing on his toes, his feet were arched upward and backwards towards his ankle which was probably 12 inches off the ground between his long feet and rather tall hooves.

His shins
were bent back, as one would expect for standing on one’s toes, perhaps 2 and half feet long they came forward to his knees, leading into massive calves.    As his heels were probably 18 inches behind him, his knees were nearly two feet in front of him and his thighs rose like mighty trunks coming into his hips more from the front than straight down.  It was as if he were crouching.  His thighs were easily three feet long and certainly over 18 inches in diameter at their thickest point.

Holy Shit!  Nestled between his thighs was a third leg! 
At least that’s what Tom thought at first.  His manhood was huge!  If someone were to say he was hung like a horse, he’d have to consider that an insult!  He was not aroused, yet the appendage was at least eight inches in diameter and eighteen inches long.  His penis hung down half way down his thighs; or would have, except it went straight down.  He was also uncircumcised.  That struck him as odd and disconcerting suddenly.  Why would that be odd compared to the rest of this?  His testicles, for example, were larger than softballs and hung almost as low as the head of his penis!  That thing was a weapon!

His pubic hair was a thick wiry mess of black hair.  Actually, that was the first hair he’d seen.  The skin on his legs was
thickly scaled.  He rubbed his thighs.  The scales were very hard almost like armor plating, with small hairs around the edges of the scales.  Tom shook his head in shock.  This was unreal.

Of course not as unreal as having a twelve pack of abs!  Jesus Christ!  His abs were insane, there weren’t that many abs on a human body
, were there?  His serratus muscles on his rib cage looked like speed bumps.  His pectoral muscles where huge red slabs with large thick nipples.  He flicked one and nearly curled over in pain/pleasure.  Clearly very sensitive.

He lifted his left arm, noting that his upper arm was now larger than most men’s thighs.  In fact, probably larger than every human man’s thighs!  He flexed; his bicep expanded into a giant mound.  The scaling on his fore arms seemed a bit heavier than on the rest of his upper body.  His lats were god awful huge though, making it so that his arms
, when lowered, were some ways from his torso.

Tom paused.  While peering under his arm he noticed movement behind him, sort of like a flag in the wind.  There wasn’t much wind up here, so what was the flag moving to?  Well, now that he thought about it, there was a slight breeze behind him.  He turned his head to peer over his shoulder.

Christ!  There was an absolutely huge pair of bat like wings rising from a mound of muscle between his shoulder blades!  No wonder his deltoids were so far apart!  He had wings!  Giant, huge, freaking bony, like bat wings with a thick webbing between the ‘fingers’ of his wings.  He concentrated.   It took some mental locating, but he fairly quickly found that he could stop the wings from fanning him and expand and contract them.

He had no idea how long he spent playing with them.  It was so weird to have new appendages!  It just felt completely bonkers!  Like having a second set of arms or something. Hot damn!  Something slapped against the back of his thigh.  He twisted down and around to look at what had hit him.

Holy fuck!  A tail!  Another freaking appendage!  He had a tail!  He reached behind to grab it and yelped in pain as his finger nails; or finger claws, he guessed, pinched his tail.  With his right hand holding his tail he took a closer look at his left hand.  Shit!  His hands were unbelievably huge and gnarly and rather than normal finger nails, the ends of his fingers were shiny carbon black curved spikes that felt attached to his finger bones.  The nails were probably nine inch long on average, quite thick and very sharp.

They’d be great for picking his teeth Tom thought.  He ran his tongue over his teeth!  Shit, that was weird!  Wait! Stop, one weirdness at a time
, Tom thought.  Tail first!  He returned to looking at what he could see of his tail.

It was attached, naturally
, to his tail bone and felt about 8 inches in diameter as it existed at the top of his butt crack.  It tapered down over about a five foot length to maybe two inches in diameter, before what appeared to be a spade like, boney, or rather, nail like, end point.  The spade shaped nail was probably eight inches across and about the same length. If it were as sharp as his nails, it would hurt.   He whipped his tail against his heel.  Ack!  Yes, that hurt.

Hell.  This was too much!  He ran his tongue over his teeth again.   His teeth were really long and
really, really sharp, it was like a mouth full of fangs.  There were a few molars that he could feel in back, but that was it. He reached up and grabbed a tooth in his mouth.  Hell! That was a very sharp spike of a fang.  The front two thirds of his mouth seemed to be full of nothing but spikey fangs!  His tongue whipped against his finger.  His eyes widened as he suddenly realized why his tongue had felt so weird at first; it was forked!  He had a forked tongue.

Tom shook his head and brought both hands up to feel his face.  His mouth and nose protruded a bit from his cheek bones; that’s how he could have so many spiky fangs.  His nose was right above his mouth, sort of like a dog’s snout, but not so pronounced.  Feeling the rest of his head, he confirmed that the image he’d seen in the misty place was accurate.  He was bald, had long pointy ears and a set of horns that could gore a bull.  They felt like immobile parts of his skull and bracing his very thick neck; he could
n’t budge the horns or his head when he resisted.

He tried to recall the image he’d seen.  Assuming that was accurate, he had large cat like eyes and the horns were the same shiny black as his nails and the spade on the end of his tail.  How tall was he?  Based on what he could guesstimate and how big he’d felt in the room, he had to be well over ten feet tall.  He stretched his wings; he had a wingspan of maybe twice his height?  What twenty feet?

Tom shook his head and realized he’d stopped breathing again.  He really needed to stop forgetting to breathe.  He shook his head.  This was just insane.  It was too much to process; he was in sensory overload.  He closed his eyes to try and calm himself.  He needed a moment to get his thoughts together, to make sense of this insanity.

He didn’t get it.

“What did I tell you?  I felt the plop!”  A high pitched voice squealed excitedly behind him.

“Yes, yes, you did.  You do have a good sense for these things.  I’ve never denied that
, dear fellow!”  Another voice replied with a distinctly British accent.

Tom whirled to confront the voices and nearly lost his balance.  He grabbed at the
stone wall beside him and heard the nastiest screeching noise, like fingernails on a chalkboard as his hand dug into the stone of the wall.  Literally, he’d clawed his fingers into solid stone.

There were two…two…somethings behind him.  The one that was more human l
ooking was wincing in apparent discomfort from the sound of his claws in the stone.

The wincing, fellow, demon, creature?  Was quite ugly.  And little.  Or rather, about half Tom’s height, so probably human sized.  On better
inspection, he actually seemed quite humanoid.  He was, like Tom, naked; and he had very long prehensile feet, very long fingers, a tail not unlike Tom’s, bat wings, horns and red skin.  Other than that he looked mostly human, ugly human, with sharp teeth, very sharp teeth.  Oh, and he was wearing a monocle.  That seemed odd.

“Greeti
ngs, fellow comrade in eternal servitude!” The fellow shouted.  “It appears you gave somebody a good fight, or maybe fright!”  The little demon flew up to the ledge; Tom stepped back for him to land; only at the last minute did he realize it might not be a good idea to let a demon land on the ledge with him.

The little demon landed and effortlessly stuck out a hand with a slight bow.  “How do you do
? Bogsworth’s the name; however the local chaps call me Boggy!”  Tom shook the little demon’s hand being careful not to crush it.

“Uh...Tom
.”  Tom responded.

“So
Uh Tom, you just get here?”  Boggy asked.  A loud buzzing sound came from above them.

“You know he did!  I told you the moment he popped up.”  The shrill voice said angrily, or at least Tom thought it was angry.  “You can smell the Mana just dripping off him!  It’s like butta!” 

Tom did a double take; the shrill voice had suddenly changed in midstream to sound exactly like a yenta from Queens.  He glanced up to see a very bizarre demon.  This demon was sort of splotchy greenish and flying with his stomach to the ground; he had four arms and four legs, all mostly human looking; just a lot of them.  He also had two sets of pectoral muscles, two sets of lats, and two sets of male genitals.  Tom looked away quickly; he really didn’t want to explore this demon’s undercarriage.  The demon also had a double set of wings, or at least Tom thought he did, they were moving very fast, like a hummingbird or something.

Boggy just chuckled.  “Yes, Tizzy, you did indeed
; you are correct; as always.”  He shook his head and waved at the little demon with a smile.  “Tom, it is my pleasure to introduce my partner, Tisdale!  Or Tizzy for short!”

“Are you calling me short?”  Tizzy asked
waving what appeared to be a curved long stemmed old man’s pipe in his lower left hand.   Boggy just rolled his eyes.

“Partner?  Are you married?”  Tom asked.

Boggy blinked a couple times trying to parse Tom’s question.  Tisdale just burst out laughing and suddenly crashed into the side of the spire they were standing on and slid down to the ledge laughing.

Boggy was looking quote perplexed.  “Uhm, partner as in business partner, associate, best friend,
bosom buddies, what all?”

Tom winced, “Sorry, it’s just where I come from well…never mind…” He’d put his foot in it damn fast.  It probably wasn’t a good idea to call a demon gay.

Boggy twisted his head to stare at Tisdale.  “What exactly are you cackling about?”

“You.  Tom apparently comes from a plane where people of the same sex can be married!  He thought I was your wife!”

“Dear lord!”  Boggy exclaimed.

“Sorry…I didn’t meant to…” Tom started to apologize; Tisdale started laughing some more.