The Charred Pits of Ir-Karnog

         I thought that I was free. The hot, dry wind whipped at my face and hair; the sulfurous fumes filled my nostrils and caused me to closely shut my mouth to prevent choking. But I was free, until I saw the new horrors.

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         There were hundreds of us. Actually, that would be a very low estimate. There were thousands of us. We were wretched, miserable slaves – naked except for the blackened, searing chains that were often wrapped about our limbs – and we were imprisoned inside the pits and caves located within the monolithic, jagged red mountain of Ir-Karnog.
         We didn’t know how we got here, and we couldn’t remember ever being someplace else. We never spoke or otherwise communicated to one another; our masters had ripped out our tongues long ago. Our sexes were kept separated; the men were on one side of the mountain, and the women were located higher up near the peaks ringed with black, stinking clouds. All we knew was torture and torment at the oozing tendrils of our oppressors, the blood-soaked Woven.
         The Woven were our masters, our leaders, and our gods. They were the personifications of all our misdeeds; though we remembered and knew almost nothing, the one thing that constantly resurfaced time and again in our aching minds was that of a wicked act we had performed in some other forgotten time and place. It was, come to think of it, perhaps why we were there. As best as I can describe them to you at all, the Woven were large, bulbous dark orbs that floated slowly through the air. They had no visible eyes, mouths, or other facial features; the only appendage they had was a grasping, tendril-like thing located on the ‘bottom’ of their orb-bodies, which repulsively dripped and oozed a thick, slimy liquid matter. That liquid was our only means of sustenance; though it tasted like a horror too impossibly atrocious to fully describe, we were forced to suck it down our throats to stay alive.
         The only reason we were kept alive was for work – harsh, back-breaking work that seemed to serve no purpose and never became closer to completion. With our mangled hands we dug and clawed at the mounds of hard red stone, carrying pieces of it here and there, wherever the Woven demanded that we move it in their deep, gurgling resonant voices that seemed to come from the centre of their pulpy form. In our lives we had but one meager pleasure, and even it was warped in its own vileness. Every so often, for breeding purposes, the women from the above caves were herded down below to us. We would then be unchained. As a mangy pack in barbarian fervor we leapt upon the women, tearing at their flesh, grasping and cruelly squeezing their breasts, and raping them viciously.
         And after that, when the women were broken and beaten and bloodied and sore, they were dragged back to their caves and we men were once again shackled like the rabid animals we had come to be, or already really were. Then for many nights afterward we would hear the shrieks of the whores above as they were ravaged by something else, perhaps our own masters, the Woven.
         With calculating purpose, it was in this repeating series of events that I found my method of madness and my avenue of escape.

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         The fiery lashes struck our aching bodies as we lifted and carried heavy stones to and fro pointlessly; the demon slime-appendages of the Woven slid into our starving and parched throats; and after many days (if days actually happened in this pestilent malice-land, and if time as you know it really passed at all), the women came, and we men were once again unshackled.
         But unlike the times before, I did not jump into the fray of violence and insanity. Instead, while our masters stared, callously and gloating at the mob, making hideous gurgling-snarling sounds that might have been abyssal laughter, I ran.
         I fled to the cave entrance; a Woven was right by me, but it paid me no heed. Its appendage seeped green slime on the stone ground below it as it hovered in mid-air cackling to itself. I exited the Charred Pits, and found myself on the sharply-inclined mountainside. Above and around me was the same bloody, lightning-streaked sky and black clouds; the choking filth-fog prevented me from seeing below. But I cared not.
         I leapt from the red mountain of Ir-Karnog to my doom, wishing for nothing other than my complete destruction and removal from this existence.
         As the hot, dry wind whipped at my face and hair and the sulfurous fumes filled my nostrils, I saw in those mid-air moments more horror than I had seen in all my time in Ir-Karnog. For an unending distance in all directions stretched a blazing, scorched Hellscape, a vile excuse for a land, covered with black swamps in which the warty night-hags and mottled-grey t’grenfrogs dwell, bleeding pastures filled with bones and dessicated corpses strung up like bloated scarecrows, and green rivers of ooze where hundreds of lost souls burned eternally in acidic torment.
         My body was broken when I landed, but strangely I did not die. I know now that there is no death in this grotesque realm. Now I am a slave of my new masters, the goat-men of Grim-shurr, tending the corpse-strewn pastures under the omnipotent and hateful gaze of the red mountain of Ir-Karnog. It is a fitting punishment.