Grip runs across a blood-red, sandy desert littered with stones, beneath a burning sun. He runs towards an active volcano, past spears littering the landscape, all topped with the impaled heads of gray-skinned orcs. He is being chased, and his pursuers are gaining on him. They’re gaining on him because his feet have been chopped off at the ankles and he is left to lope along painfully like a mutilated quadruped. The sun burns his skin. The ground tears his flesh. The orc heads on spears sprout long white hair and all whisper in the voice of an old man, “We’ll never escape!” as he passes them. He almost reaches the foot of the volcano when he feels a lurch beneath his feet and the world tips backward… and Grip falls downhill, down into the mob of dog/children.
It’s a hoard of children wearing dog masks—or is it large dogs wearing masks made of actual children’s faces? Either would be disturbing enough, but what concerns Grip the most is that he actually can’t tell. The dogs ate the children and the children ate the dogs and now they’re eating each other and they ARE each other? It’s impossible. Their ears are chained through hooks to their ankles, their noses are chained through hooks to their hands, their eyelids are chained by hooks to their elbows; every movement they make tears their flesh and causes them to howl and scream in agony, yet they keep moving.
As Grip slides inexorably down to them, scraps of yellowed parchment paper flutter past him. He sees faces drawn in black charcoal on the parchment, and the faces are moving. He sees the face of a sleek human man with wet eyes and long white hair. Word bubbles emerge from his mouth, exclaiming “What have I done?”
And then Grip slides and tumbles down into the dog/children. And they feast. Beneath the burning red sun, hundreds of little kids’ mouths filled with impossible teeth rip him limb from limb. And each severed piece retains its consciousness as it slides down an esophagus and into the burning hell of acid-sack stomachs. And the countless pieces of Grip dissolve in endless agony into millions of component scraps of skin cells and organ bits and brain matter and soul.
And then the dog/children laugh and hold hands and sing nursery rhymes and return to their home in the white stone sewers below the city by the sea. And they call out to the Corpse Orgy. And they vomit Grip INTO the Corpse Orgy. And Grip becomes one with the stinking, writhing Corpse Orgy. And then the Corpse Orgy secretes pieces of him into the sewer water, and Grip drinks himself and licks himself off the walls, joining in an endless cycle of pointless waste and consumption and it’s impossible for it to be broken because Grip IS the waste and he IS the rot and he IS the misery that lives beneath the streets and terrorizes children.
But then Grip prays—he actually prays—to be returned to his mutilated self running pointlessly across the endless desert and soon…
Grip is running. He runs across a blood-red, sandy desert beneath a burning red sun. He runs towards an active volcano, past spears littering the landscape, all topped with the impaled heads of gray-skinned orcs. He is being chased, and his pursuers are gaining on him…
First Reference: Chapter 5
Other Notable References: Chapter 10