Moria, High Priestess of Passage on Earth
Moria stared down at New York City from the top of the World Trade Center, watching the cars go by on the roads like nothing was wrong. Her black hair blew in the wind, but she just gripped onto the railing as it tried to push her back, looking down. Everyone was still acting like nothing was wrong, but most of them had to have heard something by now. The reports weren’t being considered very credible yet, but… people suddenly not dying wasn’t the kind of news that you could keep quiet for long. When it happened once every five years, that was one thing – a mix of coincidence and conspiracy theory, badly recorded times of death, and other such things. Now it had been almost three full days.
She had heard the whispers starting. Once people realized, things were going to start getting bad. People wouldn’t take disruption in the natural order like that well, even when the stupid ones among them would consider it a good thing. They didn’t realize that there were thing worse than death.
“Moria!” a smooth, husky voice said from behind her. They were back. She sighed, and turned around.
Three of her fellow priests waited for her there. The first, the one who had spoked, belonged to Lady. Moria would have called the woman statuesque, but the term failed to live up to her. She looked like an amazon out of stories, halfway past six feet tall and wide in the hips and the breasts. She looked like the kind of woman that would have every baby a man wanted to put into her, and then ten minutes later she would be cutting her way through a battlefield with a broadsword. Moria always felt inadequate standing next to her – she was just a few inches over five tall, and scrawny by comparison. Her name said it all – Moria thought herself half the woman that Lady was. “I take it from how long it took you to return that you do not come with good news.”
Lady shook her head. “We checked all the way up to the 8th gate. Nothing. Raven could be in the river before the 9th, but…”
“She wouldn’t be,” Moria nodded in agreement. “Who would?” She looked back down at the city. “So it’s true then. Passage is missing.”
“Not quite,” the man said. His voice was rich, with just a hint of a rasp to it. He spoke with a French accent from around the cigar he was chewing on… Moria was glad that the wind was blowing the smoke awake from her, it was even darker than his skin, and she knew from experience that those Cubans smelled terrible. “We said there was no sign of Raven. We saw plenty of signs that Jackal has been running around, though.”
She turned back. “Oh?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “What kind of signs, LaCroix?”
“Mangled souls,” the Creole said with a morose look, adjusting his black hat. “Badly torn and ravaged people floating down the river escorted.”
Moria winced. That clinched it. Jackal was… a necessary evil, perhaps. He didn’t really… think. He just wanted things. To hunt. To break. Most of Passage’s consciousness, the parts that Moria thought of as her Goddess’ soul, were in Raven… and she didn’t let Jackal off the leash often. His role was mostly that of a companion and protector of Raven, and to hunt those who tried to interfere with the cycle. If he was trying to do Raven’s job and take the souls of the slain away from this world, well… people were going to start noticing something was wrong faster than she thought.
“So we’re going to go look for her, right?” came the annoyingly cheerful voice of Moria’s sister. She hung from her husband’s arm almost like a bracelet… and she looked far closer to Lady’s ideal form that Moria herself did. She would be gorgeous if she didn’t insist on goth-ing herself up like that. Her eyeshadow was almost comically thick to Moria’s eyes… and people thought that she was the morbid one. These days, her sister might as well spend all her time reciting Poe she was so deep in the culture – ever since she had met LaCroix.
“You are,” Moria said, turning to look back out at the city of 8 million souls again… and imagining the chaos that would swallow them if people began to learn, and believe, the truth. How many would lose their lives, even if they couldn’t slip past the first gate? How many would wish that they could? She had to stop it. “LaCroix, take my sister and Lady. Pick up Helen and Kalaratri from Eastern Europe to assist you, and go find out what happened to Raven. A Goddess doesn’t disappear without a trace. She was on this world when she vanished… our world. She’s still here. Someone knows where she is.” Moria turned to stare at her subordinate priests with unveiled intensity. “Find her!”
Lady and LeCroix seemed to shrink away from her and nodded. Bridget, however, wasn’t intimidated by her sister. “And what will you be doing, sis?” she asked.
“What else?” she said, turning to walk for the door. “I’m going to find Jackal.”
Jackal growled as he prowled through the waters before the first gate, following his nose to his prey. She was running… he could hear her splashing through the mists as if she could run from him. He was everywhere. He was the end, come for her.
Jackal, technically, was everywhere, just like Raven was. In theory, he could be here to track down every single soul that left their body and entered this realm, waiting to pass beyond… he had the ability to do so, and had done it alongside his best friend for millions of years. In practice, however… it requires too much forethought, too much awareness of where he was needed, what was going on around him. Raven could do that – she was the one who was calm and collected, who always had a plan, who knew what she was doing.
All Jackal wanted to do was to hunt.
If most of his attention wasn’t focused on trying to track down Raven, he might have done a better job – but it was, and he didn’t. Many, many billions of the souls that popped into this realm every second were missed by him… and if they weren’t escorted to beyond the first Gate, they would be pulled back into the mortal world. Some of them would reattach to their bodies if it were intact enough… walking corpses, unaware that they were dead save for the sinking feeling of wrongness. Others would become like ghosts, drifting through the world unattached. It was Passage’s job to make sure that didn’t happen.
So Jackal hunted, as best he could, the ones who ran away. And without Raven, they all ran away.
He was close now… he could hear her labored breathing, could smell the fear coming off her. Jackal didn’t hesitate. He pounced.
The girl’s name had been Dana, and she was lovely… she had died far too young. All of the mist in the realm was him, but as more of his consciousness infused the patches surrounded her, he felt more and more of the girl, knew more and more about her. He felt her body… this one wasn’t going to be coming back, her body was in pieces. If she returned to the world, it would be as a drifting specter… and as Passage, it was his job to prevent that.
Athletic and brown-haired, she ran naked through the mists that were his body… and he solidified around her, causing her to suddenly scream as her mind was filled with an impression of white, flashing teeth and dark fur in her mind’s eye. Dana thrashed, but the mist around her turned restricting, hardening around her like a cocoon even as it began to seep into her through every opening, sucking into her lungs through mouth and nose as she took ragged, desperate breaths, into her ears, into the pores in her skin… and into both of the gaps between her legs.
The sensation of her body around him led Jackal to shudder in pleasure as her screams were choked off, the Incarnation lifting her up out of the water and leaving her hanging helpless in the air as she struggled against him. The mortal sage had had it right when he wrote of Eros and Thanatos. Life and death were intricately linked… and that was never more true than at moments like this. The splinter of Existence burned hot inside of him, searing through his mind as he felt his prey’s body around him.
And he took her.
His prey let out a sharp cry of intense pain and shocked pleasure as some of the mist inside of her grew firmer, her entire body shuddering as his solidified already inside of her cunt. Dana’s hands clawed at her bare stomach, her perky tits bounced wildly as she struggled against his restraining shell of mist. Her eyes wide, she stared down at her belly where the bulging protrusion moving underneath her skin was quite visible from the outside as Jackal began to fuck her. She was being fucked by a cock of massive proportions, even if she couldn’t see it, even if Jackal was still more ghost than real to her at the moment. Her cunt lips revealed a similar sight, stretching obscenely wide as a pillar of mist drove into her.
The agony rushing through Dana’s body had her eyes bulging and her mouth gaping open. Drool poured freely down her chin as tears trickled from her eyes as she tried to comprehend what was happening to her. The girl didn’t even realize that she was dead… all she knew was that she was scared, and it hurt. The monster in the mist satisfied his own unconscious lusts on her, uncontrolled by Raven’s calming influence. He immediately pushed into her as far as he could go, the mist becoming his member in truth deep within the confused, horrified girl. His length surged into her tight body, growing to hellish proportions. Jackal could feel her warm, gripping inner walls clenching wildly around him as he reduced the tip of his cock back into slithering mist and through the tiny opening of her cervix, then solidified it and made it swell… crushing her body completely open for in length in a sadistic instant. Dana writhed in pain, unable to scream as more of his body surged down her throat, growing longer and longer until it was fucking the entire way into her stomach, even as he began to solidify himself inside her ass as well. Her body jerked in a dozen different directions, trying to escape every source of pain in a mindless spasm and making her limbs just flop around as he fucked her intestines, stomach, and womb all at once. Each of his tendrils was a cock, Jackal’s body as amorphous as the mists that he was here.
Left alone in this purgatory, Dana’s mind worked frantically, flashing through her life, trying to seek any memory that could help her. The thoughts and emotions and dreams of a lifetime came crashing down over her in one terrible moment, culminating in the one fact her mind had been trying to shield her from… that of her own death. She watched herself fall helplessly over and over and over again, saw her body hit the mountainside and tumble, saw herself be buried as she tried desperately to reach for something to catch herself, finding a way to try and prevent a death that had already taken place. She tried to live desperately, fighting to work past the pain of three mammoth-sized prick hammering into her so she could find a way to escape. Her widely gaping cunt and ass squelched with sickening noises at every impact from the from Jackal raping members, the bulges of them traveling from her pussy and sphincter to just below the start of her ribcage. The cocks thrust and shifted within her, feeling to Dana like they were hollowing her out and crushing anything in their path. The pain kept Dana from being able to focus on trying to fight him off, but feeling the irresistible power of the God she had to know she wouldn’t have ever been capable of fighting him off.
She fought anyway, and it infuriated wolf. Mortals should know when they were dead. This was his role in the universe – to hunt those that fought and drag them kicking and screaming into their afterlife. For their own good.
He would fuck Dana into hers.
Dana’s feet kicked, danging from the air as she struggled, but the woman suddenly found herself kicking sickeningly cold water. Her legs kicked out wildly as her toes clenched up, and then Jackal and plunged her down into the water, beneath the surface of the shallow river. The dick fucking all the way down her throat began to go deeper still, even as her ass was raped even further until the cocks brushed one another inside of her from either side. Now that she was beneath the water, Jackal didn’t feel the need to hold her down any more than necessary to keep her below the surface. Dana’s arms didn’t struggle against Jackal, or even against the shafts as they pushed into her vulnerable body… instead, deadened by the madness of it, she brought her hands down her stomach, pushing in vain against the bulge of the solid pricks that were fucking her innards, turning her entire body into one clenching fleshlight. She wailed bubbled into the river, trying to push the massive cocks out of her, but finding the task impossible. Her fingernails scratched across her stretched, bulging skin but Jackal’s dicks showed no signs of slowing their thrusts. She knew her body couldn’t withstand much more of the violent fucking. Her wide eyes looked out at the group surrounding her, looking for rescue, and finding nothing but mists through the water as her skin grew paler and paler, the water leeching her vitality even as it drowned her. Dana lifted an arm out of the water, stretching it up out current as if to grab onto the living world – extending her fingers towards safety and life – but with the reaper’s grim members punching their way up through her body, again and again, she didn’t have a hope.
Dana’s bare breasts jiggled and jumped wildly beneath the water, bleaching with every passing second as Jackal fucked her soul into passivity. In the real world, her body would have been a ruined mess, but the soul was more resilient… here, she could survive the torment, and all that she wanted out of this universe was an end to her suffering. She mentally pleaded for Jackal to end it, her voice faint, her body no longer fighting as he fucked her harder and faster, using her entire essence as his cocksleeve as she jerked and writhed with involuntary motions, her arm splashing back into the water to lay limply.
And then he let himself cum.
Jackal sprayed a load of frigid cold seed into Dana as she lay limp beneath the water, cumming with incredible force and potency inside of her. Her mouth gaped open as cum from the dick that had raped her ass poured out, and further seed leaked out her stretched anus from the one that had fucked her face. Her womb felt like a frozen mass of ice as he filled it up completely, packing it solid with the freezing mass of seed, and then more and more as it poured out her hopelessly gaping cunt. Then Jackal pulled away from her, vanishing back into the mist.
Dana could run now, could try to flee this place… but she had no strength left, her spirit shattered and beaten. Instead, as Jackal withdrew, she simply lay there, slowly floating down the river to the first gate, where she would pass beyond, drifting down the river towards the 9th gate past which not even Jackal knew what awaited. Dana, her soul mangled and in pain, accepted her fate and surrendered to what came next.
Moria looked on in horrified disgust as she watched the pretty girl’s rape. This was worse than she thought.
The girl hadn’t been a threat… hadn’t been someone unaccepting of their death. She had simply been frightened, terrified, in a new place all alone. Lady Passage might be cold sometimes, but she would have understood that. She would have helped the girl along. She wouldn’t have beaten down a poor thing that wasn’t a threat to anyone like that.
And she wouldn’t have let her attention get so diverted that hundreds of other souls slipped back into the world for each one he caught.
She watched Dana go with a sad stare. The girl was going where she belonged, to the other side… and while Moria would never have chosen for her to go this way, at least she couldn’t be hurt any further. She was safe now. Unlike Moria herself, who was about to confront the most dangerous being with their attention focused on this planet.
The priestess stepped forward, the water growing more cold with every step. She was naked, of course… everyone in Stygia was naked, but it made her feel especially vulnerable now. She had been in Jackal presence before, of course, more than once… but never without Raven there to control him, to protect her. Now she had to face him alone. Each step she took was slower than the last until the water barely even splashed anymore… fear rolling off of her in waves. Prudence dictated she turn back… if her sister and the other priests could find Raven, there would be no need for this. She could turn back, be safe.
And how many souls would suffer in the meantime? How much unnecessary pain would humanity suffer that she could prevent if she hadn’t been a coward? And if not her, who? Would she send Bridget in to face him in her place?
She raised her chin and stepped forward into the thickness of the mists.
Immediately she felt this notice her… felt an intensity to their swirls. The presence wasn’t… malevolent, exactly, but it was intense, threatening… dangerous.
“Lord Passage!” She called out, trying to keep her voice from trembling. It was easier than she thought it would be. All she needed to do was envision her sister suffering Dana’s fate, and her resolve hardened to stone. “Lord Passage!”
“What is it little lamb?” a voice whispered in her ear.
It was only by biting her own tongue that Moria kept herself from screaming. Even so, she began a twitch that would have become a jump if she hadn’t ruthlessly suppressed it. One did not go about looking like prey to the world’s alpha predator. She slowly turned, seeing the floating white Raven mask with glowing blue eyes behind in the mists. “Lord Passage,” she said, bowing low. “Your servants request your aid.”
She bit her lip. “Lady Passage… she is missing, my Lord. And we need your help to find her. Please, would you do your servant the honor of accompanying me to our temple?”
Jackal stared into her, silent as the grave as his mist began to firm up, taking the shape of a body that was halfway between that of a man and his namesake, with a long, fanged snout and furiously glowing eyes. Moria wished that she didn’t feel like her God was eyeing her up like a piece of meat. The high priestess of Passage wondered if her God was about to kill her.
Then he said, “I will follow.”
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