DEGRA

Degra was the whore of Carpathia.

A  concubine of great repute to whom the Lords of Wallachia would flock. A lady of the shadows offering succour in the darkness of the warring hills.

From a tender age she had been broken by the barons; a coveted thing but a thing no less. Like a baby's rattle she was passed between the great houses guarding the slopes of kingdoms as the borders shook with the clamour of war.

Battles were won before bedding her; treaties were signed in blood with Degra looking on: siblings were slaughtered as she dressed: mistresses were forgotten with the promise of her attendance. Degra witnessed the vigorous throat of a nation slit many times as she bore the heft of vicious Kings and sprang their ill-spent spawn.

From the snowed peaks of the Tatra to the mighty Urals her name made nobles scheme to bed her, but it was in the House of the Dragon were her heart turned black. Dracul was the war lord feared by others, his passion for impaling his enemies making his name a byword for barbarism. Not yet the blood devil he would become, his lust for spilling blood knew no limits. He sticked his foes, staked his rivals, burnt his staff and ate his friends.

Upon Degra's tender body he reeked injury after injury as he tested the limits of her mortality. Brutal nights with this sexed beast were jeweled with punches, kicks, bites, burns, pricks, scalping and flaying. Degra's blood was also nightly drawn into small flasks as the Count began his heinous journey towards vampirism and its curse upon the world.

But Degra was truly defiled by others. Unbeknown to the cheating Count, once secreted every morning as he left for the border wars, Degra was captured and imprisoned in the ossuary of Dracul. In the baleful company of his jilted wives, the whore came to know the meaning of violation and the bloody pangs of their bitter scorn.

The cruel and jealous brides of the Impaler slaked their thirst for pain on the young flesh of the girl every day among the bones of the dead and her screams could be heard echoing along the valley sides. Farmers cowered in their byres and remained hidden lest they illicit the foul attention of the Dragon House.

Defiled and desolate, punctured and bled, Degra withdrew into the furthest shores of her being, a place so deep and dark that thoughts dared not form. Only hatred had a home, a seething maelstrom of hostility threatening to suck in her very soul. She was barely human anymore.

The terrible atrocities wrought upon her body continued as the Dragon's brides plumbed the depths of depravity with iron and spike. The autumnal fog settled on the kingdoms' foothills and the barons of Carpathia slowly forgot about Degra and her silenced screams.

The helpless girl's hatred of the heinous brides grew and blossomed and became a lush charred garden in the grounds of Wrath. She tended its black fauna with patience and tenderness and it billowed like the yawning beds of her suitors' mansions, where her bastard babies slept in lonely graves. Their dead dreams deepened like cysts on which they suckled and on the day of her demise Degra's true hatred was born.

It was the soulless season: winter in the lightless hills was a dire miasma of hoar and hail and the Dragon's brides were vexed by the biting cold as they ran down the long steps to the ossuary. Degra lay chained to the wall.

"So you kept our men warm on days such as this did you, whore of the slopes!" screamed the brides as they slapped the girl's listless face.

"You thought you could usurp us and dessicate our loins sad whore, but it is we who shall unseat you. It is we who shall split the cuckoo and rid the hills of your irksome ova forever. Prepare to die slowly, Harlot!"

The mean Contessas chose the symbol of the House and their husband's fearful moniker .as inspiration for Degra's doom, the long and dreadful sharpened stake.

For many agonised days and nights Degra suffered the patient curette of impalement, a twisted final coupling as the brides howled with pleasure.

When the point eventually passed through and her lifeblood spilled over, Degra's eyes were wide with loathing for the savages before her. A power began. A force forged in sadism and charged with vengeance. It gathered in Degra like a cyclone.

She thought of her unwanted bairns and smiled, her blackened heart the engine of her growing wrath as she stood skewered and raised her arms like wings before the staring wives.

Degra summoned the last residues of her dying self and issued a scream so primal, so wretched that it extinguished the sconces lighting the crypt and spattered the red-hot embers from the iron brazier. She clasped the timber jutting from her loins and wrenched it down and free. A colossal veil of her precious life gushed over the now terrified women, a scarlet tide of scolding liquid dissolving their soft flesh, stripping it from their ribs, which fell clattering to the stone floor of the bone room.

Degra wilted to the ground and folded her wounded arms around her shoulders, a curled flowerhead spent from the carnage of her blood-eagle. She closed her eyes and sensed her changing soul departing as she at last died in the House of the Dragon.

She vowed her return and knew her children would wait for her in their graves.

Degra’s soul soared like a gigantic kite, billowing with hate, fanned by a thousand desecrations. Liberated by death, she was transformed into a harpie of unstoppable force.

Unsure of her ultimate destination Degra sheered the oozes of limbo until she settled on an endless plain of darkness. She landed like a terrible moth, an eater of light and she found herself on the outskirts of Hell.

She then sensed the ground rumbling beneath her feet. Stretching the capillaries of her colossal wings she arose to face an approaching horde; a dark battalion of demons sent by the dark thing to retrieve the infamous whore of Carpathia.

The demon at the head licked its red lips and drooled as it spied the shapely wench. Its phallus engorged and swelled to huge proportions as if it were straddling a field canon.

“You shall be taken to the Dark One harlot, but first I shall sample your delights myself” it hissed as it stroked its swelling member.

The other demons looked on with keen interest and grinned inanely as they too rubbed their pulsing cocks. Through glass sharp fangs they dribbled like idiots.

Degra remained unperturbed. She had witnessed enough savage lust on the mortal plane to not recognize it here in the Devil’s realm. But unlike her mortal self she had grown immeasurably stronger in the vault of Dracul and now passed on she had become a gargantuan siren, a devourer of beings, a raptor-like wraith of limitless power and the incarnation of vengeance.

The leering demon lurched with lecherous intent and lunged its phallic ram toward her lips. Degra grimaced with her eyes shut half-heartedly yelling ‘Nooooooooo!’ but then, she opened them and smiled, a huge smile exposing a dreadful array of countless teeth as sharp as dirks.

She bit the demon’s member clean off and ate it. Crunching, she then turned to face the remaining throng. They hesitated and their exhilaration wilted quickly. Degra rose in the foul air and extended her huge wings and took flight. Her mouth widened massively and she swooped to consume the now panicking demons, scooping them up by the hundred like a monstrous basking shark.

The black plain filled with the thick blood of the mangled imps and Degra ate her fill. She alighted upon an outcrop, outstretched her wings and issued a ground-shaking roar.

At first there was silence. Nothing stirred. But then a yellowy crimson glow appeared on the black horizon like a distant fire. It grew bigger and gradually a form emerged, a horned demon grasping a towering trident. Its cloven feet punched burning prints into the vile earth as it trod slowly towards Degra. Around it the flames swirled and the figure became huge as it neared the rock.

It was the Devil himself and he stood before, her a gigantic red-hot being of fire and sinew with eyes as jet as the endless night.

“You dare to kill my demons Whore!” he yelled as the plain shook with his might. He was the monarch here in this kingdom of misery, the fallen angel from a story older than time itself.

“I am Satan, Lucifer, Asteroth, Beelzebub: I am them allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll”, he roared and slammed the shaft of his fork onto a steaming boulder, which split in half with a deafening crack.

The visitor slowly rose. She stretched out her enormous wings to their entire width and stood fully erect. Her massive mouth widened revealing her thousand fangs and she screamed across Hell:

“I am Degraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Satan was momentarily stunned by the force of her voice but rallied his vast frame and readied himself for battle clasping his giant trident, the three barbs pointing straight at Degra.

Degra hissed and flew into the rank air. She hovered in front of the Devil, a bird of prey. He lunged at her and she flew higher. He breathed fire at her wings but Degra was too fast. He cast crimson beams from his black eyes but she had grown immensely agile and spun around mid-air.

This monstrous fray continued for millennia, the foundation of Hell buckling under the strain.

After an age the ground around began to split and the trapped souls of the damned crawled out like lava.

“Look Devil. The slaves of your keep break free!” Degra laughed.

Satan turned to see it for himself and as he did Degra flew high and down, wrapping her huge wings around his lethal fork and his entire body while positioning her head just above. She opened her terrible mouth wide and her teeth glinted in the red glow of the startled demon. He looked up at her as her mouth descended upon his cranium. She smiled and engulfed his entire head before biting it off at the neck. She chewed.

Satan’s towering body fell to the ground upon which thousands of liberated spirits teemed like ants and began to feed on the red meat.

Degra cleaned her teeth and ascended high into the fell sky.

“Hell is no more, the Devil is vanquished and I set you all free!” she boomed before rising through the fly-ridden mists towards the mortal plain. She entered it where once she had dwelled two thousand years before to search for the House of the Dragon.

She found it empty, a decrepit rampart crawling with spiders and rats. Hurling them to one side she smashed her wings through the floor to reveal the ossuary, the setting of her slow immolation centuries ago. She was struck by the five coffins lying in a circle. Degra cast aside a lid and plucked out a corpse donned in white clutching a dead rat, its blood streaming from her cracked mouth. Immediately she recognized it as the shriveled body of one of Dracul’s brides, who had for so long tormented and defiled her.

The veiled corpse opened her rheumy eyes and gazed with disbelief at the wraith clutching her throat.

“Yes, Bride, it is I, Degra, returned to show my respects. Where is your master my dearest?” she asked tightening her grip.

“D- D- Degra, my Master is far away. In London Town. But he will n- never see you Whore. He has other t-tastes now!” croaked the bride.

“Thank you. I feel sure he will see me again my dear but alas you will not. For all those days and night’s I spent in your noble company I give you a parting gift”

Degra squeezed her talons harder and the chicken neck gave, the lank haired head dropping to the stone floor. She repeated this four more times and crushing the fanged heads beneath her massive feet she felt a twinge of contentment as her past captors were extinguished forever.

One more task remained before she left these hills, to reclaim her squandered children sleeping in the middens of long dead Kings. From high she called them to her.

From every corner of the dark valleys gentle rustlings could be heard as earth and scrub was pushed aside by tiny hands. The exhumed babies opened their eyes and cried as they saw their mother. Degra clapped her wings together and the babes swam through the air toward her, her dead progeny, defiled for being born as she was. She took them all beneath her wings and screamed her delight to a waiting world of the future.

Sweeping away from the fastness of Carpathia, the land of their desecration, she glided on the thermals of jagged peaks and at length reached London, where Degra saw the streets teeming with the seeming dead sleeping in shadows. She recognized that same fetid blood lust on their faces as that of the Dragon’s barren brides.

What had happened here? Was it now a world full of foul vampires?

Degra flew west towards the plains to rest her wings a while.

The city meantime bled and scabbed: slicks of evil pooled like oil, thick and crude.

In a modern world rid of Satan the undead had dominion now.

A lack of any faith was on the rise. Humanity hid. The undead swelled.

He, the Dark One, had laid his cables well since his violent nights with Degra. They had stretched into this future word.

For a thousand years they had riddled the globe; the capillaries of his thirst. Blood welled up, throats were slit, eyes were gouged, hearts were ripped from ribs. Blood overflowed in goblets.

Dracul waded through it all, waist-deep in flesh and bone. A sea of wounded tissues. He gazed at the distant plumes of fires and warfare and kicked motes of human dust across the streets.

But he was bored. The world was his. Satan had skived like a schoolboy. Bunked over the wall. Who gave a fuck where he went.

This, the Year of Our Absent Lord, 2084, was it. He was majestic. The Devil by proxy.

The vampire king dipped an acidic finger in the grue. Sssssssss.

He flew to his home of late, an ancient white square tower nestling among the steel and glass blocks of the city where he walked and pondered. It reminded him of his Carpathian home an age ago.

He sat, a wolf-bat, tedium swallowing him in a reverie of silence and echoes. He had ignited a pogrom of violence in the city's thronging streets and drank his fill there.

The Tower of London stood tall above the murderous mobs, its pale walls spattered with the crimson of incisions and slaughter. Its moat was a ring of blackened blood.

Over the coming year, the six ravens of the Tower were enslaved by him. He was the Ravenmaster.

He clipped their wings to keep them close, those five. The sixth, Drool, was unfettered to do the dark Lord's bidding. He was rewarded with biscuits dipped in blood, a treat denied the jealous five, who reminded Dracul of his wretched brides in his fortress long ago.

"Drool. Drool. Black as oil. The world is mine. My blood planet. But I am bereft. There is nothing left to turn. Nothing to infect. What can I do. Drool, what say you?" asked Dracul.

"Deepest darkest Lord of Decay, Master of the Blackest Ravens, there is a place that might allay your weariness with the world, a place that might entertain you, a place of .... worship," Drool croaked.

"Worship! Woooooorship! Whoooooo is worshipping whoooooo?" he bellowed, the Dragon, crawling down the wall.

"They worship a new one Master, humans, they have a new god," Drool whispered in his steaming ear.

"A NEW GOD!" yelled the creature on all fours. The raven stood on his back.

"Yes, Great Lord, there is an enclave, a gathering, a nest of believers, dug in like the fattening ticks on my scratty back. I know. I have seen it," crowed the raven oiling his long thick feathers.

"Where is this residue of sweet-necked bastards Drool. Where?"

"Silbery Master. Silbery Hill Hotel. A Guest House of this Faith below the green slopes."

"Take me there crow. Take me now!"

Drool grasped the thick mat on Dracul's back as he strode across the cracked land, batting away fawning sycophants with huge dog hands. They reached Silbery Hill at dusk. The Hotel nestled in its shadow like a blister.

"There Master, the hotel by the hill," Drool hissed, pointing with its wing. The vampire scratched his tattooed tongue and smiled.

"I love believers!" he chuckled, "such a vintage draught in dangerous casks!"

The monster and the crow reached the step both transforming into a travelling salesman with a large black sack.

Knock Knock Knock.

An nervous-looking woman opened the door and peered into the black night.

"Good Evening dear lady. Mister Quench at your service, purveyor of tooth picks for those who still retain the need of such simple things. May I " the businessman oozed.

"Good Evening Sir. I must ask you. Are you of the new Faith?" asked the woman.

"Agh yes madam. I am thirsty for it. You might say it has an infusing effect on me."

"Excellent. Excellent. Come in. Out of the darkness and rest a while."

"Thank you my dear."

The businessman-vampire entered the hotel and felt the first frisson of cautious excitement as he sensed the strong aura of belief within this house, a belief he would take great pleasure in destroying slowly and watch the residents' blood decant before his ancient gaze.

He was taken to his room for the night, where he caressed his raven Drool and smelled the Living in this house. He could not wait.

Dracul padded lightly out in the form of a jackal. Drool rode his back.

"I sense a gathering Master," whispered the raven., "In the chapel."

The jackal growled softly and ascending the staircase, nosed open a large teak door. Inside where candles lit by the hundred around the chapel, In the twilight Dracul could make out human forms, both large and small, sat side by side in wooden pews. At the altar stood a much bigger shape in the murk of the shadows. It had its back to the company.

The jackal and the raven loped up the central aisle to the head. As they passed each bench human eyes were upon him, the eyes of adults but also of very small babies. Babies with red eyes.

For the first time in an eon Dracul felt a twinge of fear run up his spine and his hackles rose. Drool squawked as a baby reached out for him.

Assuming his vampiric guise the Dark One stood before the figure at the altar. Slowly the figure turned and as it did huge wings unfolded and stretched out across the dark, their clawed tips illuminated by candlelight.

The winged figure raised its head and grinned at Dracul.

Recognition dawned on the face of the vampire and he tensed.

"The Whore of Carpathia!" he hissed, "Have you come back for more wench!"

"Count of the Dragon House, how I have waited for this moment, through eons of endless time, to meet you again for one more kiss!" replied Degra.

"Then come to me my dear," beseeched the Count.

Degra stepped forward smiling, her wing tips extinguishing candles.

"Babies!" she whispered at which the red eyed children rose and descended upon the raven Drool.

"Masterrrrrrrrrr!" it shrieked as they ate the entire bird, spitting out black down and returning to theor pews.

Dracul was enraged and assumed a huge wolf-bat form, growling and snarling, lunging for Degra with massive dagger-like fangs exposed, but she was too quick for him.

Wrapping her vast wings around the figure like leaves she widened her own mouth of knives. In this lethal embrace they stared at each other gnashing, fangs clashing like swords as each tried to bite the other. It was a monsters' kiss and Degra, cracking joints, opened wider still and took in the whole of the vampire's screaming face.

Suddenly the door exploded inwards and a roar reverberated around the chapel like a tidal wave.

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Degra stopped and looked up to see a colossal black figure stoop into the room and stand fully erect at the entrance, its dark hooded head touching the high ceiling, its hands hidden within its long sable shroud. A thick yellow freezing mist emanated from it and percolated the room.

"I am Death and I command you to give Dracul to me!" the figure bellowed in a deep booming timbre.

"He is mine, Lord Death. His life is forfeit to me!" replied Degra holding onto her prey.

"He is Undead Lady Degra and the world bloats with his cursed un-men. I must bring an end to his loathsome reign. Only death will do for him and his web of puppets," boomed the figure, "I command you!"

The jaundiced fog swirled around Degra and, as if forming hands, began to pull her wings apart. 

"Babies!" she shrieked. 

Her progeny hopped off their seats and looked up at the shrouded giant, They flew up encircling his shroud and ripping into tatters. With supernatural speed, the children rent and ripped until Death was exposed as a gigantic skeleton towering over the assembly. 

He gathered the mist around him and sent it hurtling towards the babies, who were ensnared in its frozen eddies and held like stuffed animals.

"My baaaabieees!" wailed Degra and loosened her grip on Dracul.

The vampire hissed and champed facing his two adversaries, his appalling talons outstretched. 

Once Degra had accepted her offspring's demise she whirled round and glared at Death and then the Count.

Death stood still and waited.

Dracul moved first and leapt onto Death's back, his fanged maw broadening as he tried to bite the deity's neck-bone. With a dreadful screech, his vampire teeth actually punctured it and drew viscous black ichor from the wounds. Dracul drank and plied his curse upon the Reaper.

But far from harming the fogged figure, the dank fluid began to ossify the Count's veins and render him paralysed. His skin began to stretch and tear, his bones cracked and his organs liquified on top the chapel floor.

Dracul writhed in agony as his body dissolved in the cold river of Death's blood now coursing through him, an extinguishing tide of finality bringing certain doom to him and his millions of followers, all interconnected by his tendrils of evil.

As Death and Degra looked on, the dying Lord of Darkness smiled. His sentence was over and he could sleep the coming millennia in the company of his long lost brides. He glanced at his two opponents one last time as his flesh and blood were powdered, curling away in the bitter murk.

Degra turned to Death and stood silently staring into his skull. Slowly her wings receded and her form softened and reshaped into the beautiful woman she had been a thousand years before in the hills of her homeland before her degradation.

"Go Degra. Live. I have no need to take you yet. My monarchy is once more restored and the graves are massing now the Dragon is slain at last. I shall be busy. Go. And take your babies with you. One day, in a lifetime not yet spent, I will visit".

From the ice of the rafters drifted small forms crying for their mother like the lambs of Carpathia. Degra knelt to hold them all and, as Death departed, shed a mortal tear and gently mouthed the word 'Thankyou' to the sky.