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Chapter 4: The Throat

Lust wracked Tuco's dreams. Some distant part of him was aware of the solid stone wall against his scale-plated back, the musty smell of the room mixed with the heavy fog of his musk. But he had fallen asleep still planted deeply in Pike, and an incubus never went soft unless he wished to. And so he dreamed, first of rutting Pike over days, over weeks, and then of others: Braxus and Etreon and Hhalbor, then the monks. Then Asmodeus again, with whom sex had been so intense and overwhelming it had almost broken him--but now he was the incubus, and Asmodeus the poor devil trapped in his realm. Now it was Tuco who could push the once-Knight of the Abyss into maddening paroxysms of arousal, and he did, toying with him over and over, refueling his lust every time he climaxed, finally leaving him incoherent, drooling from both ends on the black floor of his limbostone within Tuco's demesne.

Again he dreamed of seducing devils of the Abyss and angels of Paradise, spreading pure, soul-obliterating pleasure throughout the Earth, the Void, the Firmament. And the pleasure came back on him tenfold. Gradually he ascended to awareness and realized he could still feel the pleasure, a movement around his cock--no, his cocks. He left his eyes closed a while, enjoying the sensation. His devil cock moved on its own, independent of his hips, gripping internally and pushing itself forward, then sliding back, gripped by a tunnel slick and hot. And he must have been stroking himself in his sleep, for his hand gripped around his other cock, stroking gently up and down, pleasuring himself semi-consciously. And something hot and wet...

He opened his eyes. Pike lay sprawled against his chest, half-asleep and drooling, his lithe back moving slowly as Tuco's shaft worked steadily inside him. At the sight of this, Tuco gasped in arousal, his vigor renewed, his hips joining the action as he began fucking his friend more earnestly.

A second cock, human-looking other than its enormous size, had sprouted from his loins besides Pike, and to his surprise he saw that he was gripping in his right hand not his shaft, but Etreon, whose ever-changing skin today looked milky and wet, though whether that was due to his daily transformation or due to being soaked in Tuco's fluid it was hard to tell, for he had his arms and legs wrapped firmly around Tuco's length, moaning and kissing it, his small back arching. Tuco's hand easily encircled his back, and he'd been unknowingly sliding the little man up and down, continually coating him with slippery precome as he used him to masturbate. Etreon must have swallowed quite a lot of it, for his normally flat stomach bulged out. Tuco moved his pinky finger and slid the tip of it between Etreon's legs, nudging them apart and pushing it against his rump, and the little man gurgled a moan and pushed back against it.

Braxus lay on the floor to his left, leaning his upper body forward, his head bobbing as he swallowed greedily against a third shaft, this one the familiar red, knotted wolf cock like Tuco had grown before, both his hands gripping it about the knot as he slurped, licked and swallowed at it hungrily. His throat was hot and tight.

The sight--and sensations--of all three of his friends pleasuring him at once was overwhelming. Tuco's tail whipped against the floor with a splash--they were all lying in a warm puddle--and then with his free hand, he gripped at Braxus's head, giving the wolf's scruff a tug that he knew he liked, pushing him down around his cock, feeling his tip bury itself in the back of Braxus's throat. His devil cock flexed hard inside Pike. The feeling of three different cocks being pleased at once multiplied in his mind--it didn't push him over the edge so much as launch him over; his balls felt as though they were being squeezed. It felt as though too much come was moving through him at once. His shafts all bulged at the same time, the sensations from each distinct and yet exquisitely ecstatic.

Braxus struggled and choked on Tuco's cock--something Tuco knew he enjoyed--and then he spluttered as Tuco came, hard, come splattering out of Braxus's mouth as he couldn't swallow it all, his canine haunches hunching against the floor as his own climax was wrenched out of him by demonic power. Pike, who had been half-asleep, now woke completely, lilac eyes widening as Tuco poured into him again. With his right hand, Tuco lifted Etreon up and held him face down against the tip of his cock as hot come jetted past the little man's face like a geyser. Far from struggling, Etreon only gripped at the head of Tuco's cock and tried to shove his face into the slit, Tuco's grasp the only thing preventing him from being blasted away by the force of the eruption.

After what seemed like several minutes, the pleasure and intensity subsided, and Tuco felt satisfied, comfortably relieved if not entirely drained. Braxus lifted himself up off of Tuco's shaft, got halfway up, staggered to one side, and collapsed again. Pike just made feeble squeaking noises, panting where he lay. Tuco released Etreon, who toppled backward off of Tuco's thigh and landed on the floor with a splash.

They were lying in a puddle of fluids that must have been an inch deep. Tuco couldn't guess where it all had come from. It was streaked across the walls, spread halfway across the floor, even dripped from the ceiling. All of them were almost completely coated in it. The room reeked of sex and musk and male.

Carefully, Tuco withdrew from Pike, who made faint gasps and whimpers and clutched at the wide shelf of Tuco's chest as inch after inch of devil cock slid out of him, come pouring out with it. Tuco got to his feet, dripping from his legs and tail, and carried Pike to a mostly dry section of the floor, setting him down. The rabbit-man sprawled on his side against the wall and fell asleep almost instantly.

"Tuco," Braxus managed, sounding as though he'd just run a marathon, "so... so glad you're awake."

"What happened?" Tuco asked in astonishment. "I went to sleep with Pike and when I woke up--" He waved his hand at the soaked room.

Braxus shook his head, then his shoulders, then his whole body, spraying white droplets everywhere. "When Pike didn't come back, we got worried. We figured we'd better come and make sure nothing happened to you. Even though it was awful scary going down that stairway. I could smell the way you'd gone, so we followed you here. When we got in the room, it looked like you both were asleep, but there was... mess... everywhere, and Pike was moaning. It sounded so nice, and then I got the smell of you, and I just, I don't know, I wanted you so much. It had been so long since I'd seen you, and we all know Pike is your favorite, but it had been ages since I'd had sex with you, and I just wished I could join in. Next thing I knew there was this big cock right in front of me, and I knew you wanted me to, so I started licking. Then Etreon ran over to the other side, and--"

"And you grew a tower for me to climb, Alkeides," Etreon said in a dreamy voice, floating on his back in a slow circle. "So I climbed it and kissed the top--" He interrupted himself with a sudden burp. "And tasted nectar. Then a hand of a titan held me. So strong, so sure, putting me where I needed to be."

"It was so nice," Braxus said with a slow wag of his tail. "But it went on so long."

"Didn't you... er, finish, though?" Tuco asked, looking around at the mess everywhere.

"We did," Braxus said. "But each time when we wanted to stop, it was like something happened, and then it was like we hadn't come at all. It was even stronger, I just wanted you even more. We couldn't stop. We didn't want to stop."

"Oh." Tuco's scaled ears burned. "I learned I could do that with Pike. I didn't know I was doing it to you, too. How many times did you..."

Braxus lowered his own ears. "I lost count after five or six."

Tuco stared at him.

"And then it went a long time longer." The wolftaur gave him a weak, fanged grin. "I don't know if I'll ever want sex again."

"I could help with that," Tuco said, returning the grin, and despite himself, Braxus answered with a wag of his tail.

"But not today?" he whimpered.

"I'll give you a little respite. But I missed being under that tail." Just thinking about that made his loins reshape themselves with a pleasant, shifting sensation, cock flesh sliding against cock flesh, and when he looked down, he saw he had two again instead of the three from before, which would at least be slightly manageable. "I don't suppose anyone has heard from Hob yet?" he asked.

Braxus shook his head and then yawned widely, tongue curling between huge canine teeth.

"Go lie down," Tuco urged him. "Get some sleep. I'm going to wander around a little and see what else is down here."

"You will be careful, won't you? That Flavros fellow might pursue you here as well. And who knows who might come after him." Tuco assured Braxus he would be cautious, and the wolf padded over to curl up in a mostly dry corner of the room, after pulling Pike and Etreon up to slumber in the soft fur of his flanks.

Tuco stood watching them for a while, his tail swaying slowly. His boys. He had three handsome men he couldn't get enough of. And now that he was looking for it, he saw his mark on them as well: three circles held inside a larger one. It glinted in subtle rainbow colors, like oil on water, at the center of Etreon's lower back. Across the left side of Braxus's chest, the dark hair curled around a pattern of light spots that formed his mark there, too. So they were his not only here in the mortal world, but in the Abyss as well. It would be his responsibility to look after their souls for all eternity, three more lights flickering in the darkness he held within him.

He was going to have to become smarter and stronger as a devil now, not just for himself, but for all the souls, evil or not, that he held responsibility for. The thought was overwhelming, and he fought a moment of panic, escaping the room to catch his breath and refocus himself.

The watch room for the monks had been in disrepair and shabbily appointed, but in comparison, the hallway outside was hostile. It was cold, smelled of wet stone and mold, and was filled with the horrific sounds of the things trapped in the Throat's prison. Immediately Tuco missed the heat of the room, the smell of himself, his friends. But though it was tempting to return to his lair, he followed the hallway back to the great stair.

Curious to see just how far down it went, he followed it, his devil's eyes needing no light sources to illuminate the world around him. His vision didn't extend infinitely; some distance down the stairs, any detail blurred away and faded into darkness, but otherwise the cavern might have been illuminated by a thousand torches. It was hard to believe that he was moving through absolute and total darkness, just an unseen monster creeping down the stairs. After some time of walking, the hewn stone stairs became ruder, as though whoever carved them had become tired, or had less time. The stairs narrowed, drawing close to the right wall of the cavern, and began to descend in a counterclockwise spiral that twisted and bored its way into the bedrock below, so that even if Tuco dared to peer over the side--which he did not care to do--he couldn't see much.

All down here was deathly silent, the cries of those imprisoned above having long since faded away. Every step Tuco took on the stairs was a rasping break into that silence, his breaths those of a subterranean, slumbering giant. Even his blood seemed to roar in his ears with no other sound to interrupt it. And still there was no end to the descent. Tuco wondered if he ought to turn around and head back up; while he was certain he had only journeyed a couple of hours at most, he had no knowledge of how far the slope continued. Perhaps it was a journey of days, or weeks.

But he thought he still had some time before he needed to return, and so he continued following the corkscrewing path downward, until he noticed a reddish-orange light coming from below. The intrusion of actual light into his devil vision granted an eerie aspect to the passage, for suddenly shadows were cast around the steps and the crags of the stony wall where before there were none. The walls around the rough-hewn stairs looked ridged and uneven, as if an immense, subterranean worm had chewed through the very bedrock of the earth. The rock glittered in the light from below, tiny facets reflecting the unearthly glow. Tuco wondered what the rock this far down could be made of, thought of the limbostone of the Abyss, and shivered.

By this point, the stairway had become more of a craggy slope, and soon it led out into a massive cavern glowing with orange and red light. The light shone from around the edges of an enormous metal disc set into the floor. Other than the prison of E-Temen-Anki, Tuco had never seen anything so enormous in all his life. The disc seemed to be made of wrought black iron, and stretched across the cavern floor at a span easily wide enough to hold his entire home village three times over.

"So," he breathed aloud, "the world is protected from the Abyss by this enormous... disc?" The cavern caught the bass rumble of his voice and threw it back to him in echoes, breaking the silence of the still, deep world. Immediately he felt uneasy, watched, as though he'd disturbed some great, slumbering beast. He crept forward. The light pouring from around the disc came up through great cracks between the disc and the stone in which it was set. Curiously, he followed the edges of the disc around the cavern. The edges were uneven--in some places, the top of the metal disc jutted up fifteen feet above his head; in others, it was sunken deep in stone that overlapped its rim.

Tracing the circumference around the cavern, he eventually came to an enormous stone seal, about twenty feet across, set so that it rested half-embedded in the stone floor, half clamped down over the disc. Strange runes had been carved into the seal, letters of some ancient language Tuco did not recognize, but whose symbols and serifs filled him with a deep and inexplicable dread. Something in his head felt raw when he looked at them, as though the letters were even now etching themselves on the inside of his skull. In the center of the seal was an image in relief. At one point in time, it must have been intricately rendered, but time had dulled and blurred the features. Still he thought he could make out the aspect of some grotesque creature in the center. Its appearance was so deeply horrifying--a head covered with enormous eyes and bristles, and a squat, misshapen body with elongated, multi-jointed limbs--that Tuco felt grateful its details had been eroded. In the image, its head had been separated from its body, torn away by some powerful blow or force. For a short time, he studied the strange image, but found it so unsettling that he could not look at it for long, and moved on.

He traced the edge of the disc for another long distance. Presently, about a quarter of the way around it, he found another seal, again with the unpleasant, brain-scraping lettering encircling it. The center of this disc held a different image, this one of another terrible-looking creature. Its body was covered with eyes, and it had six large, feathery wings, like those of a dove. Two rose behind it, two covered its face, and two covered its feet, and each of its eye-riddled arms bore a sword. From behind the wings covering its face jutted two goatlike horns, and its feet were cloven hooves. A spaded tail eerily resembling Tuco's curled from behind it. There had been other details as part of the image, but they had been obscured by several large boulders that had apparently fallen from the cavern ceiling some time ago. With little effort, Tuco was able to remove the boulders, but found that the fall had marred the image, and whatever secrets it revealed were now lost.

His curiosity piqued, he continued following the disc counterclockwise until, just across from the spot where he'd found the first, a third seal pinned the disc to the cavern floor. This one had little damage; barely even any scratches, and the image on this one was clear, and so familiar to Tuco that it sent a shudder through him, followed by a sense of rising horror. The image had haunted him as a young boy, a thing to be terrified of in the dark, and now here he was, deep beneath the earth, seeing it at the edge of the Abyss. The image was not identical to the one he'd known as a child, but the important details were all the same. This was the Beast of the Apocalypse, the seven-headed dragon, tearing its way out of the mountain to lay waste to the world. Despite himself, he shrank back from it.

He had faced many devils and demons, and even seen Prince Sathanus himself, but the Beast was a terror beyond all those, and when he rose to do battle with the forces of Paradise on the fields of Megiddo, the Earth itself would be split asunder, and the world of mankind would fall forever. This, then, was the end of the world. These were three of the four angelic seals that bound the Abyss out of reach of the mortal world. In the Apocalypse of John, the final book of scripture, an angel would blow a trumpet, and one of the seals would break asunder. When all four seals were broken, the Abyss would be opened, and the world would end. This was what the monks of Abyssus Abbey had determined to prevent. And here, below their very walls, sealing off the Throat of the World, were those four seals, and this enormous metal disc was the lid that covered the end of days, the cap that kept the Apocalypse at bay.

Waves of dizziness and dread flooded Tuco, and suddenly he couldn't witness this terrible place any longer. He hurried around the enormous, sealed door to hell, making for the stairs back up to the human world. As he did so, the orange and yellow glow of firelight grew brighter and brighter around him. It blazed around the edges of the disc, shone through forking cracks in the stone. Then he came to a stop in horror.

A hole, a great chasm in the cavern floor blazed with firelight. All around its edges, shapes crawled--shapes of horned and winged things, clutching at the exits, clawing their way free of the firelight that coiled tendrils around their limbs and bodies, as though attempting to drag them back down. They were demons, squirming free of the infernal plane below. Beneath them surged a lake of fire, churning, rolling in waves of flame, sending up great molten belches and fiery spirals that darkened to ash and drifted back down into the liquid flame with bright puffs.

But it was not all this that horrified Tuco. He had seen demons before. He had been to the Abyss. He had confronted liquid fire all around him. What was worst of all was what lay around his feet, cracked and ruined, the images that might once have adorned it shattered forever. The stones that lay before him were charred and layered with the fine grey powder of ash. It was the final seal.

#

He ran all the way back up the stairs, bounding up them several at a time. Once or twice he misplaced a foot, but he caught himself, tearing grooves in the stone as his claws sank in. When he finally reached the passage back to the monks' watch room where he'd spent the night before, he was panting, though not with exertion, as his changed body seemed tireless. The fear still rattled through him. He wasn't afraid of devils or the Abyss--at least not what he'd seen of them so far. But the Beast? The Apocalypse? That was something altogether different. The end of the world--of everything--was something he never hoped to see. He might be shut away in the Abbey, but it was reassuring to know that everything else was still out there: the glittering night stars, the dark green forests, the farms with fruits and vegetables, the people gathering in the fields for ale and games, the ships tracing their tracks across the sea. How could all this be meant to end? How could it be that everyone was meant to die, and go on to Paradise or the Abyss?

Tuco knew where he would be going; he had a realm there already, but he doubted his family would end up there. He hoped his friends would not. Rationally, he understood that the world probably could not persist forever, that its ending had been prophesied, but the Abbey was here to forestall that if not defer it entirely. And yet it had already begun. He crept toward the door to the watch room and pushed it open, lifting it a little so its hinges wouldn't creak.

A wave of musk hit him in the face. The room was still soaked. He needn't have worried that he'd been gone too long. Braxus still slumbered heavily, curled up in the corner with his upper body resting atop his lower, Etreon wedged between arm and chest and making tiny snores. Pike had ensconced himself in one of the moldering beds--probably not the cleanest place to sleep, but at least it was warm and relatively dry.

Tuco crept across the room as quietly as he was able, then scooped up Pike in his arms, putting one hand over his muzzle so he didn't wake the others. Pike's eyes widened, and he struggled in visible terror for half a moment--Tuco could taste his fear on the air--but then he seemed to realize he was not, in fact, being snatched up by a giant rabbit-eating monster, and relaxed in Tuco's arms, though he was scowling fairly furiously as Tuco carried him out of the room.

Once the door was closed and Tuco had set Pike down, the rabbit shook his finger in Tuco's face. "Don't ever do that to me again!" he shouted. He put one paw against his chest and staggered back a little weakly. "Do you know what you look like now? Ugh, my heart, my poor heart."

"I'm sorry," Tuco said, his tail dropping limply across the floor. "I didn't mean to scare you, I just didn't want to wake the others."

Pike panted, pacing back and forth a little. "You have to start understanding what you are now. You could disembowel me with those claws, you could eat me, you could tear me in half, you could just, hell, slap me, and you're strong enough to kill me with a blow."

"But I wouldn't do those things!" Tuco protested. "You know I wouldn't!"

"I know, you know, but I was asleep, Tuco, I was sound asleep, and I was dreaming of things in the Throat, and then something enormous with teeth grabbed me and lifted me up in the air, and--"

"You're right, I'm sorry, I--I wasn't thinking. I was just scared."

That seemed to jolt Pike out of his ranting. "You, scared? I've never seen you afraid of anything. What could even scare you now?" A look of concern flowed over his face. "Was it another devil? You know, we think we know what the next devil is going to be, and it's--"

"No, Pike, I-- Look, I was bored, and so I went down the stairs."

Pike stared at him. "Down?"

Tuco nodded.

"As in all the way down?"

"There was a big metal cap over the Abyss. I mean big, PIke, bigger than the Abbey, bigger maybe than a city. And all around it were these seals. The Four Seals."

"What do you mean, the four seals, you mean like seals for a letter, or for..." Pike trailed off and took a deep breath. "Oh. Oh. The Four Seals. Those seals."

"Yes. And Pike... I... We have to tell someone. One of them was broken."

"Now, when you say broken, do you mean like, there were chips off of it, or a big crack running through, or--"

"There was a big hole where it used to be, and beneath it was a lake of fire and demons crawling through."

Pike blinked. He licked his lips. He rubbed at his whiskers with both paws. He blinked again. "Well, that's... bad."

"I thought so."

"But Tuco, who are you going to tell?"

"Brother Gabriel?" Tuco suggested. "He does care about righteousness. He'd have to care about this, wouldn't he?"

"He'd throw you into the Throat the moment he saw you. If he didn't cut your head off with that sword of his."

Tuco snorted. "He couldn't cut my head off."

Pike stared at him.

Tuco shrugged, feeling a little awkward. "It's the scales. What happened in the Abyss. I'm pretty sure I'm swordproof."

"Then he'd stick it in your eye. Or throw you in a fire. Or push you out of a window. Or poison you. Or make you drink acid. Or--"

"All right, I see what you mean. I'm not invulnerable. Though, like you said, I'm pretty strong and scary now. I wouldn't bet on him in a fight."

"I would. Because you and I both know you wouldn't hurt anyone, and he would."

"Well if not Brother Gabriel, then who?"

"Let me ask around. I'll talk to Rigby, roundabout-like. Feel him out, see who we could talk to who might be willing to listen."

Tuco took a breath. "I know someone who would listen. Lord Krastor."

"Y-e-e-e-s," Pike said slowly, "but he's in the Throat."

"Yes." Tuco lifted one arm and pointed toward the sounds of screams and moans. "Right at the end of that passage."

"Tuco, no. I know you think you're tough now, but nothing can prepare you for what's down there."

"Do you know? Have you seen?"

"I've--" Pike's ears folded backward. "I've heard stories. And I've seen... I was here when an apprentice got turned too far. So far he had to be taken to the Throat. And one of the Brothers who took him, when he came back, he... he wasn't all right. Something down there got in his head, I suppose. He started screaming. For no reason. Just standing in a room, and he'd scream. And not like a normal person screams, with their eyes squeezed and their mouth twisted, you know, making an expression. With a perfectly still face, he'd scream, as if he didn't even know he was doing it, as if he was just thinking about what to have for dinner or wondering what the weather was like outside. But all the while his voice was going raw with his screams. They took him away, to a hospital outside. He never came back. And none of the Brothers would ever talk about it. They wear their hoods up when they go down there, you know. So they can't see. Whatever is down that passage, Tuco? It's madness. You mustn't go. I know you cared for Lord Krastor. Others I liked have been taken there, too. But they're gone. Once you go to the Throat? It's over."

"But maybe there's a way we can protect ourselves, or--"

"Tuco, please." Pike gripped his hands in his paws, squeezing them tightly. "Promise to me you won't go down that hallway. Swear it."

Tuco shook his head. "I can't, Pike, what if we--"

"Swear it for me," Pike begged him.

"All right," Tuco said, taking a deep breath. "I sssswear it." He hadn't even realized he was lying until he saw his forked tongue flick in the air before his nose.