A forceful cascade of drums punched through his back, mangling his skeleton and forcing the bones to branch outward, piercing muscle, nerves, and skin, skin that by now was little more than flaking ashes. Suddenly with a great heave his skin rippled and quaked, shaking and falling off in crumbling chunks and scattering in a blinding cloud of dust.
He screamed an unearthly howl as his vocal cords rasped, disintegrated and reshaped themselves, forcing him to cough on their ashes as they fell down his throat. Still, there was only one thing that truly held his attention, one thing that mattered. “An-“ he hacked and wheezed as the churning wracked and melted pieces of his flesh. “Ang-Angel... Please,” his shattered remnants of a voice rasped out. “Please...”
A cascading wave of screeching pummeled through his skull, warping and distorting it; with cracks and the creaking of bone it snapped its way forward. The Chorus’s resonating shattered his teeth like glass, leaving broken remnants that were pounded out by the sharp tearing instruments that stabbed their way through his gums, the teeth of a flesh rending predator.
As his body convulsed and was wracked by the thundering drumbeats, his skin cracked and fell to pieces like an ancient statue left under the constant erosion of acidic rain. His face split open like a broken mask, exploding like a hot light bulb with water thrown onto it; with an ear piercing shatter it splintered into a thousand pieces, the façade shattering forever. Breaking into dust it swirled around him in a black maelstrom that obscured his sight; the dust grew so oppressively thick he could not get a clear breath without choking and coughing as each breath brought another lungful of grime and ashes. His face, now free of the mask heaved forward like a cloud of nerve gas released from its canister; his shifting skull violently pressing itself onward to show its naked form to the world, a thing of blackness and deceit.
Gasps of horror ushered and Angel recoiled, crawling away on her back, her legs quaking too much for her to stand. Even midst his agony, as his vision blurred and shifted, dust swirled everywhere, and his body warped from its humanity, he saw her clear as day. “Angel... P...” he stopped and clenched his shifting teeth and his hands of bone, twisted flesh and ashes, “Please, I didn’t mean...”
An explosion the likes of Mt. Vesuvius erupted in his back, accompanied by a hammer of pain that knocked the wind out of him, decking him in a face-plant to the ground. His distorting face, rapidly forming into a snout, pushed his head back, forcing it off the ground as his snout grew longer and larger and craning his neck at an odd angle. Immediately bones shot through his back, spiking and radiating outward like a flower, blossoming midst the maelstrom of dust into an array of dark flesh. Thick membranes grew and dangled from them, hanging like hides from freshly slaughtered animals.
His lower spine punctured ever outward into a tail, curling around itself as the nerves and muscles fought like rabid dogs to assert themselves. Mass added itself from nowhere, weighing him down with more and more draconic flesh, leaving him struggling to breathe as his muscles fought to catch up with the rest of the growth. His hips twisted and asserted new shapes, his legs reassembled themselves with a deafening roar, soon they too grew to reflect the Chorus’s dark, twisted design.
Soon there was but one last thing that remained definitely human. Peter focused all his desperate, scrambling will to stare at his sister, to show her that he was still here as she knew him, to show her before...
It was too late. An ashen wind pierced his eyes, darkening and dissolving them, casting aside the old discarded flesh that now crumbled into ashes and dispersed itself into the dust storm. His agonized screams which sounded less and less human could not drown out the Chorus as it exacted its work, forging its own eyes for him, the red, slit-pupiled eyes of a demon.
There was no single thing left to identify this mass of darkness and ashes as a human being, nothing except a vague shape that was merely a ghostly echo of what once was; that and a screaming imprisoned presence within that beat with futile maddened despair against its cage, a mind that despite everything that remained all too human.
His hideous, malformed body now shaped itself quickly with the prodding of the cloud of darkness, and his massive hellish form, that which existed before only as an echo in the dark secret corners of his being, was becoming reality.
Now the Chorus resounded further, and as it reverberated through him a covering of rusted red scales at last began to cover his body, wrapping him and sealing the darkness within him. His vocal chords at last aligned, and with the end of his metamorphosis the Chorus reached it massive, terrifying crescendo. He had no choice but to add his own voice to it, a hellish, inhuman roar that shook the heavens around him, trembling the world just as it wracked his own being. A scream of agony and grief, it sounded of a great and terrible beast with the heart of nothing more than a pitiful, wretched, selfish human being.
Having reached its thunderous climax, the Chorus died down and quieted. But it didn’t disappear entirely; Peter was still breathing.
With fear and trembling, Peter attempted to steady himself and slow his breathing. The pain, at least, was gone. But his entire body felt wrong. And as he opened his eyes, he saw things humans were never meant to see. He saw his sister less as he saw her before, her soft, peach skin outshone by the heat radiating off her; her tender, innocent face a burning image of searing infrared. His stomach heaved at how his own eyes were doing this.
Angel, having seen this revelation and his eyes having been opened, had fallen on her back, overwhelmed with indescribable fear, too petrified even to cry. Her eyes were locked on him, this thing that she had thought had been her loving, older brother.
“Angel,” he whispered frantically, scrambling to for the words. “I-I... I’m so sorry,” was the only pathetic answer he could give. Her face remained a contorted mask of terror, the lines of which so deeply etched that she would never know a smile again.
“THE WITNESS HAS SPOKEN HER TESTIMONY,” the Voice returned, followed by a long, unbroken silence. The dragon that called itself Peter stood apprehensively, attempting to control his breathing and trying his utmost not to break down weeping on the spot.
“THE CULPABILITY OF THE ACCUSED IS DECIDED.” A further pause sent Peter’s heart racing uncontrollably.
“GUILTY.”
He had known in his mind that such would be the verdict with an almost absolute certainty. This did nothing to prepare him for the weight of that one word. It slammed into him, crashing into him like a ton of bricks, like a mountain, taking away every last piece of hope and shattering it like glass. His lungs seized and his throat constricted, his face froze and his blood turned to ice.
Searching for something, anything to grasp onto, he turned to his sister, panic and desperation covering his face. “Angel please. Please! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I never wanted...”
His sister did not respond, only standing up trembling as a strange glowing hand appeared holding something that was extended for her to take. “Please! I never meant for any of this to happen!”
She took the implement as it was offered to her.
“I’m sorry! Angel! Angel!!” he screamed in desperate sobs, his voice becoming choked with tears.
Her finger found a switch on the object, turning it on. The flashlight erupted on with an unnatural fury, cleaving the universe around them and able to smash the mightiest of mountains.
And then she pointed it at him.
The light blasted, seared, cut into him like millions of tiny knives, pounding him, thrashing him, throwing him into writhing torment. His pleas were drowned as nothing but deafened screams could escape his mouth. The light blasted away the ground, pelting and pummeling him with debris. He sank his hideous draconic claws down to find a foothold, but everything he scrambled to find gave way to the light’s terrible power.
A cascade of raw cosmic energy had been unleashed, and its tumultuous presence broke heaven and earth wherever it touched. He found himself caught in a vortex, a swirling maelstrom of raw judgment, ever sucking him in and down. He struggled, he fought with his limbs, wings, and tail, but all this was utterly inconsequential in the face of the downward force dragging him into the fathomless depths below.
He spun and he spun as he fell, a screaming and flailing mass of terror. An entity, the entity, the oscillating vapor-like being that had been the catalyst for all this, regarded him curiously as he fell and screamed.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
* * *
Peter screamed, a deafening roar so loud it shook his own skull. He screamed and screamed until realization came that there was nothing else around him and... he wasn’t falling anymore. Gasping for breath, he slumped over in exhaustion, too tired to move or think. He had no idea as to where he was, but it was difficult to bring himself to care.
Darkness prevailed all around, with not the slightest ray of light to penetrate the total blanket of pitch blackness that grasped him. He heard the faintest echoes of his own movements and that of the calmly sloshing water, indicating a cave of some sort. But there was solid ground beneath him, and he was alive. For that he felt grateful for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
