SHIN'S DRAG

The first thing to say about this tale is that everyone dies.

And when I say everyone I mean every fucker.

It contains a battle where the air was a fog of blood, a stinking scarlet Hell of curved steel and chopped meat, where men were beasts writhing in the pit.

But we'll talk of cruelty again.

I need to tell you about Shin.

Shin was a young pageboy to the great stupendous clan leader. He'd handed him his giant Katana before the fray in the billowing tent on the sloped field. The flags of the clan eeled in the breeze rising off the Sea of Japan.

Shin stared at the flags above their heads and watched his master ride into the ranks, where they waited for his command to face the enemy.

The tent was empty save for Shin and his Mother, who sat on stools cleaning the victory standard, its triumphant brocades gently shining as fresh cleansing water passed over them from a bowl.

"Our Master will prevail my Shin, do not fret."

"Yes Mother, but I sense a darkness and a dread. Is that a betrayal of our Master?"

"Betrayal? It is love. You are our Master's ward and it is natural for you to worry."

His Mother held him in the shadows of the canvas, the dawn light firing the dust like swarf.

"We shall prevail my Son."

Shin was six years old.

The little boy retired to his mattress and cuddled his rag bundle and slept as the battle bared its fangs in the valley beyond.

"Sleep well my love".

His Mother kissed him on the forehead and sat in the bamboo chair at his side, waiting for news. She sharpened her spearhead with a stone moistened with water from the stream nearby. She could hear it burbling like children in the golden age.

The morning turned to noon. A faint rain washed over the hills and whispered down the tent.

It said wake up Shin, your Mother is screaming.

Shin sprang up to witness the most soul-crushing thing.

A dark colossal Warlord was bent over his kneeling Mother fucking the life out of her, his lacquered armour clicking as he rammed with violent thrusts.

Shin's Mother yelled.

"Run, Shin, Run!"

But Shin was frozen to the spot.

The general raped his mother over and over and over. He penetrated her with every stick and cudgel in the rack, every staff, stave and arrow, a human mortar moaning in excruciating agony with every insult to her once beautiful body. 

Her injuries mounted as the General enveloped her like a giant blood bat, his colossal black shellac helmet rising like a phallus in the dusted shadows.

The General, his thirst for evil almost satiated, hefted the 15 foot long naginata super spear and with one final but hideous smile beneath his death mask slowly thrust its razor sharp tip far into his Mother's loin. 

She screamed as all the pains of Hell exploded. He groaned as he flexed his massive frame and pushed its shaft deeper into her body, tissue and bone no match for its heinous blade and his abhorrent strength.

As the bloody spear emerged like a demon from his Mother's torn mouth the General vaulted the pole upwards and forced its head into the soft ground with all his might. 

It quivered and towered above the boy, his reviled Mother stuck to the top, from where she slid, slid, slid and shuddered down the spear head down. As her impaled mouth reached the tent floor she stared in horror at the scene before her.

The General had turned his dreadful attentions to the boy. His sick perversions bruised and cut his tender flesh as he himself was raped and tortured by the sable wraith corrupting the very air he breathed. At the terrible end the General drew his sword . 

The boy, on his knees, bleeding and battered, stared upwards as the beast's katana slid between his young lips and like his Mother he was invaded. He shrieked in unimaginable pain as he was cut away. The warrior lifted his sword high into the air with the child impaled on the blade like a squid. 

Upon seeing the terrible immolation of her beloved Shin, with one final and rasping death yell the Mother screamed a garbled curse so vile, so hateful, so skin-crawling, that the General lowered the skewered boy and turned.

"M -M- Mark me, you cowardly insect, as you bask milk-bellied in your bastard's fortress, I shall come for you in the dead of night! I shall cover you when dream of your blood-soaked riches and I shall enter your body like a glacier of teeth and slowly eat your flesh and I shall eat everyone in your clan until there is no-one left to eat. Only then will I stop."

The General visibly squirmed as he listened to this nerve-searing vow. He stepped forward and pressed hard on the Mother's face until it burst open with a loud crack, her life-blood spilling onto his boots. He grimaced and flicked it off as he strode out of the desecration, his dark cape billowing behind like Death's itself.

Now the story takes a turn for the worst. Remember, every fucker will die and I meant it.

With the stink of iron infusing the tent and a primal scream lingering like an echo, Shin's crushed hormonal soul turned into a ghost. Confused, shaking, a boy spirit doused in sorrow.

His mother became something else altogether. Something indescribable. Something nightmarish, a scorched necrosis in a bag of dreadful hate, a maw of loathsome hunger bereft of morality, mercy or compassion. 

Her appetite for the flesh of men knew no bounds.

Shin flickered. A misty waif, he coughed up ectoplasm.

"Bastard bollocks!" he rasped and began to stagger towards his changing mother.

He grabbed her wet matted black and white hair and dragged her dead-weight out of the tent, a wide red stain marking their passage.

"Fuck cunt fuckers!" swore Shin's ghost as he struggled to hoist his mother along the ground towards the opposite encampment, where the enemy where celebrating victory.

As the pair approached the Victor's tent they saw the murderous Warlord fat with triumph on his belly. Giggling concubines massaged his creamed flesh like a wet fish but they flinched at the sight of a ghost boy hauling a mangled pulsating mass through the canopy towards them.

Shin placed his finger to his lips.

"Shush you fuckin' whores!" 

Shin stopped at the Warrior's feet.

He and his Mother stared at each other, shed a poetic tear and nodded gently.

The reckoning would be now. The baleful calculus of vengeance.

The ghost boy prodded the Warlord's foot. 

He turned his oiled hulk onto his back and gawped at the phantom.

Shin winked.

"You're fuckin' deader than dead!"

Shin watched with wonder as his Mother-pile sprang from the ground and enveloped the Warrior's feet in a swirling drape of rotting flesh and began to loudly devour him.

The doomed man screamed and watched as his body got shorter piece by piece. 

First his pale legs. Then his quivering waist. Then his corpulent torso was digested, his ribs sucked, his lungs and organs slurped like stew and eventually with a toothsome smile the Mother cracked open his face and with a hurrah from Shin his shocked brain mouthed out and he was gone.

"Fuckin' hell Mother! We did it! We have avenged our deaths!" exclaimed Shin's ghost.

They embraced under a spatter of stars.

Only then did they hear the soldiers sat reveling by the banks of the river.

Shin braced his Mother's hair and threw her ravenous remains into the throng. She landed with a loud splat on the middle of a table, knocking over bowls of eyes and teeth from the battle slain.

They stared at Shin's Mother shaking like a wig.

"I'd fuckin' run if I were you!" warned Shin.

Before they could she cast out hundreds of tentacles of corrupted flesh and snatched each and every feasting warrior present. 

She drew them all into her open cavernous gut and chewed and chewed until there were no more.

"Avenged and fuck yeah!" roared Shin.

They turned and sloshed across the river into land's unknown.

The fill of soldiers greased her way and Shin lugged for love.

But this sweet retribution, as silver as it was, simply wasn't enough for Shin or his Mother.

She was still starving and their searing hatred of Mankind slowly consumed them like the fires of damnation and they continued to walk the World, a wretched maelstrom of seething wrath.

"There's still so fuckin' many Mother!" Shin laughed.

He pulled. She ate.

She ate everyone they met. A curette of men. A globe-scraping abortion.

Her cavernous sack-belly swelled to enormity: the bulging souls of all humanity trapped within, dissolving into star gas.

They walked until the land ceased at the oceans, where they swam until the land regained.

When there was absolutely no-one left they came full-circle round the Earth returning to the field of their demise.

Here they sat and embraced each other, a maternal heap and a flickering boy.

"Fuckin' hell Mother. We've done it!" signed Shin.

They sat for eons and wept for joy staring at the stars as they fell from the firmament and nothing remained of them or anything at all.