CHAPTER 7: "BEDLAM'S BASEMENT" "VIKINGS WAR IN VALHALLA"

BY WILLIAM WARNER

CHAPTER 7: "BEDLAM'S BASEMENT" "VIKINGS WAR IN VALHALLA"

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The air in the dining chamber was thick with grease, rot, and something worse — despair. Forks scraped against plates, laughter from the Demonettes echoed like broken music, and our minds drifted in a haze of sedatives and illusions.

Ben wasn’t so lucky.

He was slumped in a chair at the end of the table, a gallon-sized jug of frothy amber beer shoved between his shaking hands. Two incubus guards flanked him, their whips raised high. The lash cracked down across his back each time he stopped to cough, spit, or sob. His eyes were bloodshot. A stained plastic bag hung in his lap, half-full of vomit.

"Drink," one of the guards snarled, voice like grinding gears. "Let go of your restraint. You know you want this."

Ben took another gulp, gagged, and vomited again.

I stood slowly, heart pounding. “Why are you doing this to him?” I asked, keeping my voice calm but firm. “What’s the point?”

Madeline stepped forward from the shadows, arms folded across her chest. Still wearing her slutty lime green yoga pants.

Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Pleasure,” she said softly, “is the most efficient form of freedom. If you indulge in it long enough, you forget the outside world ever mattered.”

Ben moaned, a wet, guttural sound that was barely human.

Then one of the incubi turned to me. “You're all being prepared,” he said flatly. “The Underground is next.”

I blinked. “Underground?”

Madeline nodded. “A place beneath even this. Where your real memories sleep... and your real temptations wait.”

A shiver ran through me. I looked back at Ben, then at the others — survivors, once strong, now shadows of themselves.

Something was coming. Something worse.

And I knew — if we didn’t find a way out soon, we might not come back the same.

Or come back at all.

The metal platform vibrated beneath our feet, lowering us deeper into the bowels of the Wraith’s underworld. The elevator shaft was no ordinary tunnel—it was a grotesque museum of Earth's most infamous ideologies and empires, twisted into mockery.

Flickering holo-projectors lit the curved walls. Nazi flags curled like rotting petals in the stale air. Tattered Confederate banners hung beside rusted swords and piles of brittle skulls topped with Soviet hats and turbans. Weapons from every age were mounted like trophies—machetes, flamethrowers, bio-bombs, archaic flintlocks. Pages from every holy book—Bible, Quran, Torah—were encased in plexiglass frames, stained in ink and old blood.

The elevator groaned as we passed a massive mural etched into obsidian stone: a snake eating its tail, its body composed of masses of humanity—half in ecstasy, half in agony.

I turned toward Madeline, who stood proud at the front of the platform like a tour guide for Hell itself.

“What are a bunch of degenerates doing with militant control group artifacts?” I asked, voice hard.

The words weren’t even cold when her nails slashed across my cheek. It wasn’t a deep cut, but it stung—more for what it symbolized than the pain.

“I warned you about that word,” she hissed. “Degenerates? That’s their word. The tyrants. The control freaks. The priests. The patriarchs.”

I pressed my fingers to the scratch. Warm blood beaded at the surface.

Madeline’s tone softened, becoming saccharine as poisoned honey. “Look around, hun. All these groups—they had their time. They ruled with iron fists, twisted minds, and holy fire. But they’re long gone now. And we’ve moved on… to something better. Something more honest… Me!”

Her grin stretched unnaturally. “We indulge, because it makes us free.”

I stepped closer, not because I trusted her—but because I had to understand. “This isn’t freedom,” I said. “This is just the same tyranny, wearing lingerie and laughing at the rules it broke. You’re just another cult.”

Madeline chuckled. “Then this is the fun cult.”

We passed deeper, the light dimming until only orange glows lit the shaft. Behind us, the others were silent—eyes forward, minds wrapped in a fog of despair and chemicals. Even Ben, who had once defied them, stood quiet now, a bandage around his mouth and the stink of dried beer on his skin.

I turned to Madeline again. “You say this is about liberation. But I’ve always believed in democracy—flawed, sure, but at least it asks questions. What you’re doing… this isn’t consent. It’s coercion through pleasure.”

Madeline waved her hand dismissively. “No one’s forcing anyone.”

“You stabbed me for resisting,” I reminded her.

She rolled her eyes. “And now look at you—so calm. So relaxed. All the sex, all the chemicals—they’ve made you less violent. Less likely to hurt innocent people like me.”

I stared at her for a long moment. “What about pleasure at the expense of others? What if what I want… hurts someone else?”

Madeline stepped closer, her breath hot against my ear. Her voice was silk over blades.

“Who gives a damn what others think of you?” she whispered. “Just take what you want.”

I felt my stomach twist.

Then she leaned in again. “And if your desire is to get violent, or hurt others—” her smile widened, eyes glowing like reactor cores—“then I’ll just tell you who to hurt.”

That’s when I knew. This wasn’t freedom. This wasn't a pleasure. This was control masquerading as hedonism. A new order, one without uniforms or flags, but ruled by appetites and algorithms that rewired minds with indulgence instead of chains.

This cult didn't want slaves.

It wanted worshippers—who thought they were free.

The elevator came to a stop with a jolt. A massive gate stood before us, carved from the bones of fallen creatures and adorned with pulsing veins.

The Underground.

It reeked of damp lust, hollow laughter, and buried truth.

And we were being ushered in as pilgrims to the god of excess.

As the bone gate groaned open, a hot blast of fetid air rolled out, thick with sweat, blood, and sulfur. The atmosphere shifted—denser, heavier. Not just physically, but spiritually. I could feel it pressing on my chest, clawing its way into my throat like invisible hands trying to pull my soul down into the bowels of depravity.

The final floor was unlike anything I had seen before.

We had entered The Vault, an underground coliseum of torment and pleasure—a labyrinthine dungeon of steel mesh walkways, flickering red spotlights, and stained floors that looked permanently wet. The air vibrated with screams, laughter, and the constant hum of electrical current running through the walls.

Madeline turned toward us with a smirk. “This... is where the real believers come to test themselves.”

The first thing I noticed was a man—a human—strapped to a rusted metal cross, arms stretched wide. His back was flayed open, strips of skin hanging like crimson ribbons. Three demonettes circled him like vultures, each one cracking a different kind of whip. Their movements were elegant, almost ceremonial, as though pain itself were a dance.

The man’s eyes rolled back into his head, caught in the trance of pleasure-pain. I couldn’t tell whether he was sobbing or laughing.

Madeline motioned to him casually. “Some seek truth through agony. The body knows what the mind denies.”

Further in, I saw a woman crouched in a corner of a padded cell—her veins darkened, her skin pale with blue blotches. Arrows were embedded in her limbs, the shafts trembling slightly as her body convulsed. At the tip of each arrow, miniature syringes slowly emptied their contents—narcotics of the worst kind. Fentanyl. Ketamine. Psychoactives designed to overload her pleasure centers while severing her sense of time, reality, and memory.

She looked up briefly, eyes wide but unfocused. Her lips moved, forming the word “please,” but no sound came.

I felt bile rise in my throat. I turned to Madeline.

“You’re torturing them,” I said, barely able to keep my voice steady.

“No,” she replied coolly. “They’re choosing this. Every soul down here signed the contract. The Wraith doesn't take prisoners... It takes volunteers.”

She reached into her robe and pulled out a thick, black ledger bound in a stitched hide. When she opened it, I could see page after page of names, each signed in black ink that shimmered faintly. My own name was there, somewhere. I didn’t remember signing it.

Then came the warriors.

Towering over both human and demonette, the brutish enforcers stood along the perimeter like ancient statues—waiting, watching, breathing slowly through gnarled nostrils. Their skin was leathery and sun-dried, a burnt orange hue like mummified flesh left under alien suns. Some still bore remnants of tattoos or branded runes—half-forgotten tribal symbols, cult marks, military insignias from extinct empires.

Each had a unique face, though they all followed the same brutal anatomy: flat, bat-like faces with slitted, reptilian nostrils; conical heads that stretched backwards like helmets forged from bone; long, forked tongues that flicked through yellowed fangs. Black, pupil-less eyes reflected no light—only the void.

They had no genitals, no identifiers of pleasure or reproduction. Their power didn’t come from lust. It came from submission to the system, from enforcement. They were punishment incarnate.

Backwards-bent legs like those of a raptor allowed them to move with terrifying precision. Their hooves clanged against the grated floors as they shifted positions. And their horns—each different in length and shape—protruded like natural weapons, crusted with dried blood or gold leaf.

“These,” Madeline whispered, as if proud of her collection, “are the Wrathborn. Born from desires that can’t be satisfied. Rage, vengeance, obsession. They have no will—only directives.”

I asked her, “Who gives the directives?”

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she stepped closer, placing her hand on my chest. “You feel that emptiness again, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“That’s not guilt. That’s your old self dying,” she said softly, almost motherly. “You’re shedding your human skin. And soon, if you’re strong enough, we’ll find what lies beneath.”

I pulled away. “And what if I don’t want to know?”

Madeline’s voice hardened. “Then you’ll rot above with the sheep—drifting from one delusion to the next, living for dreams that were never your own.”

A scream echoed from deeper in the Vault. It wasn’t just pain. It was despair. The kind of despair that gnaws on your soul until nothing is left but instinct.

I looked at the survivors. Ben was breathing heavily, eyes glazed over. A few others stared blankly at the scenes unfolding, unable to process it. The candies they were fed earlier must’ve dulled their nerves, softened the horror into something they could tolerate.

I remained sober. Whether by luck or fate.

And I realized something chilling:

These people weren’t being forced into this nightmare.

They were slipping into it.

Like gravity pulling them deeper the moment they stopped fighting.

And if I didn’t resist—even in the smallest way—I would fall too.

The temperature in the air thickened with the stench of iron and sweat as Madeline escorted the survivors and I off the platform. Behind us, the elevator groaned back up the shaft, its chains clanking like the laughter of ghosts. We stepped onto the solid blackstone floor, heat rising beneath our boots as the smell of scorched bone mixed with sulfur.

We walked through the Training Grounds of Wrath, where the Wrathborn demon warriors clashed in mock battles. Towering brutes with armor made of chainmail and cured flesh dueled each other using crude cleavers, energy halberds, and sharpened metal fists. They didn't spar for technique or honor; they fought like rabid beasts—each strike meant to tear, to kill, to devour.

Sparks flew from weapons. Blood splattered on walls. Even training here was an act of butchery.

Madeline said nothing as we passed, but her eyes gleamed with anticipation, as if she were guiding us to a crescendo—a performance we hadn’t yet understood.

We moved beyond the carnage and entered a towering corridor. The walls were constructed from fused bones, ancient skulls stacked so densely they formed pillars. As we walked, I noticed each skull bore a different mark: tribal sigils, collapsed empire symbols, corporate logos. All the dead belief systems—devoured and repurposed as architecture.

Ahead loomed a massive archway of fused rib cages and molten iron. Firelight pulsed behind it like the heartbeat of a buried leviathan. We entered the Skull Throne Room, where the air was no longer just hot—it was alive with pressure, like a volcano seconds before eruption.

And there he was.

Seated atop a mountain of bleached skulls and charred shields sat the Lord of Violence. His body was immense—easily twice the size of the other Wrathborn. His limbs were gnarled with muscle, veined like rivers of lava, his skin a darker orange, mottled with black callouses from centuries of battles.

His horns protruded from both the front and back of his head, curving around like a grotesque crown forged from obsidian. The ones at the back swept like scorpion tails. His face mirrored his soldiers—flat and bat-like—but when his jaw opened fully, a second jaw beneath revealed gleaming mandibles, clicking hungrily like a hunting insect.

He sniffed the air as we approached.

“Ah,” he growled, voice as deep as tectonic movement. “Fresh offerings.”

He closed his mandibles, let his forked tongue flick out, and stepped down from the throne. Each step made the floor tremble. His eyes locked onto me.

“I am Caine,” he said. “Once a god. A god of war. A god of blood. Feared across five solar sectors. Worshiped by fleets. My name was burned into the minds of children before they learned to speak.”

He circled me slowly, his presence suffocating. “But even gods die. When the galaxy turned soft, I was left without worship, without armies, without purpose. And then she came.”

He gestured toward Madeline, who stood smiling, arms folded.

“She did not try to stop me. She did not shame me. She simply whispered... You don’t have to pretend anymore. You are not a god. You have a desire.”

I stared into his black eyes, searching for deceit. There was none. Only a calm certainty—like a priest who found a new gospel.

“Madeline,” he continued, “didn’t ask me to lead more armies or start another war. She told me I could do what I was made for. Not in the name of empire or control, but simply because it pleased me.”

I swallowed, heart pounding. “You gave up being a god... to be her servant?”

Caine laughed—a sound like boulders grinding together.

“No, child. I didn’t become her servant. I became her believer.”

Then he leaned in close, his massive, hot breath washing over me like steam from a boiling grave.

“So, tell me, William of the Above. What is it you desire?”

I hesitated. All the memories of war, suffering, corruption, and madness ran like flashing images behind my eyes. The Wraith. Earth’s collapse. The broken empires. The fake heroes. The hollow pleasures.

“Some freedom,” I said. My voice came out dry.

Caine tilted his head. “Freedom... Freedom. But desire—that’s real freedom. That’s primal. That’s eternal. You think you want freedom, but what you truly want... is to be unchained.”

He grabbed a rusted chain from a nearby rack and threw it at my feet. “So go on. Pick it up. Feel the weight of it. You don’t break chains here. You wield them.”

I looked horrified. “This is a cult.”

Madeline smiled. “No, William. This is a sanctuary. A temple where no one judges what you crave.”

I shook my head slowly, staring at the chain on the floor. It pulsed faintly—like it could hear my heartbeat.

“You say this is freedom,” I whispered. “But it’s just another kind of leash.”

Madeline stepped toward me, placing a hand on my shoulder. “No, love. It’s only a leash if someone else is pulling it.”

I stared at her, and something inside me snapped. Not from anger. Not from fear. But clarity.

“I’ll never be one of you.”

Caine stood still for a moment, then chuckled. “Then run, little wolf. But remember... in the Wraith, even your rebellion feeds the machine.”

The survivors and I turned, making our way out of the Skull Throne Room as the shadows grew behind us.

This wasn’t freedom. This wasn't a pleasure.

This was a prison dressed as a paradise.

And if I didn’t escape soon, it wouldn’t just devour my body. It would eat my will.

I was hard-pressed to accept it, but the truth stared me in the face: these so-called Wraith gods—once worshipped, once feared—had all fallen. Not by war or betrayal, but by indulgence. Seduced by their own desires until they forgot what they were. They weren’t gods anymore. They were followers. Of her.

Of Maladrie.

I turned to Madeline just as she began to shift.

Her skin shimmered, shedding the illusion of a mortal woman like the peeling of old flesh. It darkened to a lustrous, sun-scorched orange, smooth but radiant like magma-glazed stone. Her once-human face became subtly more angular, unnaturally symmetrical—still beautiful, but no longer real. Her black hair stretched down her back like liquid shadow. Small, elegant horns curved from her forehead, slick and sharp.

The rest of her followed: black leather wrapped her now-demonic body in tight, cruel geometry—underwear shaped like armor, thigh-high boots laced like corsets. Wings unfurled behind her, leathery and wide, flexing with a predatory grace.

Still her eyes glowed that soft, inviting violet.

“You see now, don’t you?” she said softly, stepping toward me. “I never lied, William. I only shed the mask when you were ready.”

“You’re Maladrie,” I whispered. “The one the Wraith speaks of is like a myth.”

“Not a myth,” she purred. “Just a desire strong enough to be worshipped.”

Ben stumbled back, clutching his head. “She’s not just a demon—she’s inside people. She gets in their heads.”

I took one more step back, staring at her wings, her form, her face. “You don’t need chains or fire. You make people want to give themselves away.”

Maladrie smiled. “Because deep down, everyone wants permission to fall.”

We passed the Skull Throne with solemnity. Caine—once a god, now merely a monstrous disciple of indulgence—gave us a quiet nod as we crossed the obsidian walkway that trailed through his lair like a serpent’s tongue. His hulking silhouette lingered behind us, watching, but not following.

Beneath the bridge we now walked across, a river of blood churned thick and slow like boiling tar. Limbs bobbed in the current—arms frozen in agony, legs twitching with residual nerve spasms. Skulls rolled like forgotten relics beneath the surface. The scent was coppery, heavy, clinging to the back of my throat like old metal.

Brody nearly slipped, catching himself on the bone-shaped railing. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Where the hell are we going now?”

I didn’t answer.

Because I didn’t know.

On the other side of the bridge, the temperature dropped. The architecture tightened. The path led us into a narrow black hallway, carved not by design but by a force too alien to care for symmetry or aesthetics. The walls were moist, veined like muscle tissue. Faint blue light pulsed from behind the fibrous crevices, like a heartbeat—alive, and watching.

Then the corridor opened.

And we stepped into madness.

This was not pain for pain’s sake, nor was it indulgence masquerading as pleasure. No—this was a laboratory of disturbed desire, where the physical limits of flesh were violated in the name of something darker than lust.

Slabs of slick steel stretched across the chamber like operating tables, each one occupied by a living victim. Men, women, and species I couldn’t even recognize—all of them were opened like books, their organs twitching beneath the unforgiving fluorescence. And yet… they breathed. Their eyes blinked. Their mouths trembled with muted screams, unable to die, unable to escape.

The ones performing these surgeries were not demons.

They were something worse.

They looked like the grays you’d see in pop culture—short, lanky, and hollow. But these weren’t the cute E.T.s from a Spielberg movie. No. These were corpses animated by hate and perversion. Their skin was decayed and paper-thin, mottled and translucent, clinging to their frames like soaked gauze. Their eyes were smaller, deeper set, ringed in necrotic black. Their faces were tight and stretched, exposing jagged teeth in constant snarls.

Each of them had protruding skulls with exposed veins, and from the back of their heads jutted thin spines—like insect antennae—connected by pale webbing that quivered whenever they moved.

They operated with precision, slicing, injecting, probing—as if pleasure and pain were interchangeable.

Ben retched. I pulled him close to keep him from falling.

One of the rotting greys looked up from his work. He approached us, blood dripping from his claws.

Maladrie didn’t flinch. “This is Sector R,” she said, her voice chillingly calm. “Where trauma is studied, recorded, and… experienced.”

The grey hissed, but Maladrie waved her hand. “They’re with me.”

The thing backed away, uttering a low clicking sound. Its throat bulged as it swallowed something—something wriggling.

Ben stared at her, pale and trembling. “Why are we here?”

Maladrie’s smile faded. “Because you need to see what happens when pleasure is misunderstood… when desire becomes labeled as obsession.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Is that what this is? A warning?”

“No,” she replied, turning to face me fully. “This is your test.”

She gestured forward. Another hallway lay ahead, lit by flickering red lights and echoing with distant cries.

“You want freedom?” she asked me. “Then understand the cost. Accept your desires, and live with them.”

I glanced at Ben. Then back to her.

"And what about you?" I asked. "What did you want?"

Maladrie looked away—just for a second. But in that second, I saw something flicker in her violet eyes.

“Redemption,” she whispered. “But I found something better.”

Without another word, she led us forward.

And I realized:

We weren’t just walking through a nightmare.

We were becoming part of it.

The chamber pulsed with an eerie silence—thick, heavy, breathing.

From the rows of dissection tables and surgical horrors, one of the ET demons stepped forward. Taller than the rest. Its eyes glowed faintly from the hollow pits of its rotting face, and its ribbed spine twitched beneath the veil of webbing that dangled like torn silk.

It hissed in a voice that sounded like metal scraping on bone.

“We betrayed our god… for her.”

It motioned toward Maladrie, who stood in the shadows, wings folded behind her like the curtain of a fallen theatre. Her expression was unreadable—serene, even proud.

“He wanted restraint. We wanted to feel,” the creature said, bloodied hands gesturing to the room. “So we cut… and we learned what it means to transcend morality.”

The survivors whimpered beside me. I said nothing. I was trying to understand. Trying to resist vomiting.

The creature turned and pointed one bony digit toward the walls.

“Look.”

The walls were not stone.

They were people.

Or what was left of them.

They formed massive fleshy tapestries—skin fused to stone, limbs stretched out like canvas. Faces blurred, twisted, melted together into one another. Some still had eyes. Eyes that blinked. Watched. Begged. Lips trembled, whispering prayers or curses, stitched into silence.

“They are still alive,” the ET demon rasped. “A living record. Our gallery of guiltless pleasure.”

I stared in horror as one wall-panel twitched. A bulbous eye opened within a mouth, and a muffled scream echoed beneath the thin membrane of tissue.

And then the creature pointed again.

This time, to the far end of the room—to something hanging like a grotesque tapestry centerpiece.

The fallen god.

He was pinned to the wall, crucified not with nails but hooked wires. His skin was peeled from his limbs, revealing raw muscle and blackened veins. The fingers were stripped to the bone, tendons trembling with every shallow breath. His head, mounted sideways like a half-finished portrait, gasped—mouth opening and closing like a fish choking on air.

“He was a god of order,” the creature whispered. “But Maladrie taught us that pain… is a better architect.”

I looked at Maladrie.

“Why?” I asked her softly. “Why do this?”

She stepped into the red light, her demon form glowing with predatory grace.

“Because these gods thought they could contain the Wraith. But I let it loose… I let you loose.”

She smiled.

“And soon… you’ll thank me.”

The air grew colder and wetter as we descended deeper into the facility. The corridors were wide and dimly lit, their steel walls slick with condensation—or maybe something worse. A slow drip echoed down the tunnels like a heartbeat in decay. The deeper we went, the more twisted the surroundings became. This wasn’t a lab. This was a nightmare sculpted into architecture—walls made from surgical steel, yes, but also at times stitched flesh, veins running through conduits like tangled cables pulsing faintly with life.

Our path was flanked by thick windows—glass walls that revealed horrifying displays within isolated chambers. Each room contained a story… or rather, the consequence of a desire given form.

The first horror was a man being transformed into a living chair. His limbs were folded and nailed into shape, muscles pinned beneath decorative, quilted leather made from his own skin. Bones protruded where ornate chair legs were meant to be. His mouth was kept wide open with metal hooks, forming the chair’s hollow cushion. His eyes were fixed upward, blinking in cycles of despair as his muscles involuntarily twitched. On his back, words had been carved with precision: “Loved furniture more than family.”

We kept walking.

The next room revealed a grotesque fleshy hybrid of man and machine. A man’s torso was fused into the dashboard of a car made from sinew and bone, his eyes doubled as headlights, wide open and glowing faintly with bioluminescence. His jaw had been broken and stretched to form the front grille. His internal organs had been rearranged, tucked neatly behind glass engine compartments filled with viscera. The tires were formed from calcified loops of cartilage wrapped in hardened skin. His lungs inflated with fuel. His spine was the drive shaft. On the wall, burned into metal with acid, were the words: “He loved his car more than anyone else.”

Further on, we entered a much larger gallery chamber. Tall columns loomed like titanic ribs from some beast long dead. And inside each cell? Lycanthropes—people who had desired to become beasts. A forest of cages and operating slabs displayed the warped results.

A man was halfway through being transformed into a wolf. His face was elongated with stretched skin over newly grafted snout bones. Fur had been sewn into his flesh in patches, not grown. His spine had been extended and curved to form a tail, which spasmed like it didn’t belong. He howled—but not with pride. It was raw and broken, a sound that echoed more like a death rattle.

Another man had wished to be a T. rex. His body was grotesquely restructured—arms amputated, his shoulders fused and re-positioned to the front of his chest with crude, stubby claws grafted on. His legs were artificially thickened with transplanted muscle tissue, bound together with clamps and iron rods. His lower jaw had been stretched and locked forward to mimic the snout of a predator. Tubes filled with hormones and growth accelerants fed into his back, causing his bones to rapidly expand and fracture. He lay twitching in agony on a surgical platform shaped like a fossil bed, surrounded by mock jungle ferns made of synthetic nerves.

I swallowed hard and kept moving.

A woman was next—being reshaped into a giraffe.

Her neck had been broken in several places, then elongated with bone grafts and steel rods pushing through the meat like scaffolding. Her arms and legs had been forcibly narrowed and bent backward. The surgeons had injected fat and filler into her thighs and chest to form a more “giraffe-like” body mass. Her skin was being dyed in patches, turned yellow and brown, while mechanical syringes pulled and stretched her scalp upward, inch by inch, to simulate the elongated crown of the animal. Her feet had been amputated and reshaped into prosthetic hooves. She didn’t cry. She couldn’t. Her jaw had been stitched shut into a semi-permanent smile. A grin that mimicked the innocent expression of a grazing herbivore.

The words scrawled across her enclosure, pulsing faintly with red light, read: “Always wanted to be tall. Now you are.”

Every transformation was a desecration. Every chamber is a mockery of free will and personal identity, twisted by obsession and the illusion of self-expression. There was no sedation. These people were awake. Aware.

We continued in silence. Not because we had nothing to say, but because anything said here would drown in the screams reverberating from the walls.

Time lost meaning in the bowels of that facility. The artificial lights overhead throbbed a dull violet, washing the room in a dreamlike glow that made flesh shimmer wetly and stainless steel glisten with clinical malice. The hum of machinery never ceased—drills, bone saws, the wet slap of organic matter being handled like clay.

I was chained upright, limbs spread across the cold exoskeletal frame of an operating rack. My arms trembled in the restraints, not from pain—at least not yet—but from the psychological weight of helplessness. I had no power, no voice in this theater of madness. I could only watch.

Brody and Tom were first. Their screams started high and strong, but faded into ragged sobs as the Demonic Grays began their work. Each movement was surgical yet twisted, performed with the meticulous precision of artists rather than butchers. Their sharp, slim fingers worked like bone chisels as they peeled back skin, severed tendons, and shifted internal organs into unnatural shapes. They were reshaped into grotesque caricatures of the things they once loved—video game controllers. Their torsos were compacted and narrowed. Buttons, made of their own severed thumbs, were sewn into their chests. Wires—veins and nerves pulled from their spines—were threaded through their limbs and looped back into ports punched into their skulls. Their mouths were sewn into mute O-shapes, mimicking a joystick’s circular motion, eyes permanently rolled back. Human forms stripped of humanity, trapped in cold plastic parody.

Evelen's turn came next. I wished I could look away—but something unseen forced my gaze forward. The Grays used her blond hair as the foundation of a tail, weaving it with tendons and reinforced cartilage. Her torso was elongated with mechanical stretchers that popped her ribs and expanded her spine. Limbs reshaped, fingers broken and fused to mimic hooves. Her face… God, her face… was extended forward, the jaw dislocated and pushed outward, surgically forced into a horse-like snout. Tubes were inserted under her skin, pumping unknown chemicals that swelled her muscles into animalistic proportions. But her eyes—her terrified, pleading eyes—remained human.

Ben and Page’s table was just across from mine. Flaying is not fast. It’s deliberate. Their skin was removed in thin sheets, carefully peeled like wrapping paper from a gift no one should receive. What remained was blood-slick muscle, throbbing under the cold light. The Grays rolled their skin like parchment, molded it, reshaped it, until their bodies—skinless, raw, half-unconscious—were fitted into giant glass vessels. Translucent tubes were inserted into their throats and intestines. Slowly, the shape of two massive beer bottles began to emerge. Their skulls were smoothed, sculpted with polymer flesh putty to resemble bottle caps. The smell of hops, alcohol, and iron filled the air—one more nauseating mixture in a room already saturated in horror.

Max's fate was almost too absurd to be real. Yet it was. His limbs were stuffed with raw meat, organs flattened and redistributed like burger patties, then layered between slabs of his own skin hardened to simulate a bun. His chest cavity was carved out, filled with his tongue and fatty tissue shaped like pickles. His screaming mouth had been repositioned, grinning wide at the side of the “burger.” His eyes, blinking slowly, were embedded in the folds of faux lettuce—blinking, not from consciousness, but from unprocessed neural commands still firing in his butchered brain.

Denton and Taps were merged into twisted plant-like forms. Their limbs were torn from their sockets, then crudely stitched into their backs and shoulders at warped angles. Each finger was manipulated and bound to resemble leaves—dozens of them. Their spines were hollowed and filled with dark, fibrous plant matter. The Grays inserted small LED grow lights into their chest cavities, bathing their mutilated forms in an eerie green glow. They resembled a fusion of corpse and cannabis, grotesque tributes to an obsession they had never admitted aloud.

And then came Jackson.

His transformation was half technological, half ritual. The Grays removed segments of his body with precision—replacing arms and legs with jagged machine prosthetics made from alloys and cybernetic bone grafts. Cables embedded in his spine hissed with steam. One eye was removed and replaced with a glowing red lens. His jaw was split and reattached with mechanical clamps. Metal plates were bolted to his skull, brain matter exposed between the ridges. He didn’t resist. He looked… satisfied. Finally becoming what he had fantasized about. A cyborg. An automaton of his own dark dream.

This entire ordeal stretched for hours—though it felt like centuries. I was forced to watch every second, unable to blink, unable to scream, my body locked in a psychic paralysis. The Demonic Grays moved around me, occasionally glancing at my vital signs. They never touched me, not yet. They wanted me to see first. To understand.

Then she came.

Maladrie stepped forward, tall and poised, with her sensual demonette form rippling beneath shadows and faint light. Her wings flared slightly as she approached, eyes gleaming with twisted amusement. She raised one finger—nail glistening with something sharp and red—and dragged it across my chest with gentle mockery.

Her voice was sultry, low. It slipped into my mind like smoke curling into a locked chamber. I asked her, my voice barely audible, “Am I just here to watch?”

She tilted her head, mockingly confused.

“No, silly Willy,” she cooed. “I think you’re finally giving into your desires… and setting yourself free.”

Then, with a single slash of her clawed nail, the restraints fell away.

Everything dimmed. My body sagged, falling weightless as the world turned soft and dreamlike. The blood, the screams, the horrors faded into a surreal haze. Her voice, the last anchor to reality, echoed in my skull like a lullaby.

“Let’s get you somewhere nice.”

Darkness wrapped around me like a warm blanket. My thoughts dissolved into nothing. I never saw the others again.

Good riddance I suppose.

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CHAPTER 7: "BEDLAM'S BASEMENT" "VIKINGS WAR IN VALHALLA"