Chapter 511

The serpent, once confined to the earth, watched the birds with an unnerving focus. It was not hunger, nor envy, but a different, colder sensation. A desire.

It felt a stirring within its core, a repulsive notion taking root and sprouting into a grotesque imitation of ambition. Its scales, a dull green, began to prickle, as if something unnatural pushed beneath.

The first attempt was a fall, a flailing mass of scales and muscle plummeting to the dust. It left the snake broken, seething in silent frustration, with pain pulsating through its fractured bones.

But that seed had already grown deep into the serpent's essence, twisting its core into something beyond recognition. It would not relent, not for one moment, from its horrifying goal.

Weeks crawled by, each painful attempt slightly more refined, slightly less disastrous. The forest around it, once a domain of comfort, now held the discarded skin and scales, markers of the monster's vile obsession.

With each attempt the ground beneath the snake was marked by destruction, not of some battle, but from what felt like its own terrible, painful birth.

Then, something different occurred. It was not flight, not yet, but a clumsy gliding, a controlled descent that held the sickening taste of promise. Its eyes glowed with an intensity that no creature possessed, or at least it had before this moment.

This grotesque, vile ambition gave birth to its horrible capability, that which made its brethren both shocked and terrified. The world began its long, miserable demise on that day.

It took time for the serpent's skills to develop, months of silent practice high up in the boughs, of awkward hops, of long drops, of close calls, but in the end it was an unnerving marvel to see. The venom that always lingered now became its ammunition.

Its skin changed, not just color, but density. Scales hardened, formed into crude plates, a horrible attempt at natural armor that helped it as it climbed among the heights.

Its fangs grew long and thick, producing more venom. Not a natural venom. Not something from this world, for the very air itself around it became contaminated by its nature.

The change was horrific, the kind of transformation whispered about only in terrible nightmares. What once slithered now could cut the air with a ghastly ease. It was an abomination and soon, very soon, it would share its torment.

It began with small game, forest creatures falling from the sky, poisoned in the act of flying. It perfected the motion, twisting its body in an elegant dance of death as it took to the sky.

It tested itself against flocks of birds, then bats, moving with deadly efficiency among them, with sickening ease and dreadful grace, like some phantom serpent out of a dreadful fever dream.

Then, it flew toward populated places, as if it was drawn by some vile magnetism, something awful to look at, something too sinister to consider.

Villages felt the serpent's fury, a shower of venom raining down on terrified villagers, not because it craved death, but because it wanted others to hurt as much as it did. Its intentions were horrific, a testament to what an ambition too terrible could turn into.

Screams reached its scales but brought it no joy, only a dull, vacant sort of gratification, the sort a horrible entity of an unidentifiable purpose would have. It soared, no longer just a snake, but something far worse.

The towns suffered immensely from the bombardment of deadly liquid. Crops failed, animals fell still. Despair spread as fast as its venom did through the atmosphere.

People moved inside. Closed all their windows and bolted the doors. But no barriers could withstand its awful wrath for long. The scent, vile and putrid, it filled their spaces.

Then the sickness set in. Rashes and welts at first. Then muscle spasms. The victims' eyes grew wide with dreadful awareness as their blood curdled with the horror of their awful demise.

Many who didn't succumb to the liquid venom still felt the very touch of it from within, a putrid rot seeping in, festering into the very depth of their souls, leaving nothing to save them.

Jareth was a scholar. He cataloged the creatures of the world, searching for reason in the organic. Now, he only stared at his work, now covered in the strange acidic material that smelled of decay.

He sat in his tower, watching the world burn beneath him, pages stained and smeared by the putrid fluid, scribbles and drawings fading like lost hopes. It came up here as easily as anything below.

His breath hitched. His insides shook, for the presence, its dreadful presence was there in every shadow and it only came to be as an ominous dread in his own head. The walls seemed to groan.

He tried to find logic, any logical thread to grab at but it was all so maddening. The only answer he could see in its madness was how far it was from logic. There was something truly unnatural about this monster.

He tried to understand why. To figure out how, and in what way. But nothing in his entire repertoire helped. Every formula and theory and every scientific study he'd ever studied went out the window, left in the dust.

"Why?" Jareth said into the putrid atmosphere of his lonely tower, for no other soul would hear him in his time of suffering.

The serpent never seemed to rest, every town, every hamlet, every city felt its dreadful visitation, that vile and horrific downpour. Its presence always heralded dreadful changes.

It twisted among the skies with a horrible ballet, an obscene celebration, leaving a poisonous mist trailing in its awful wake, for not even the natural laws of gravity meant a thing to its madness.

It brought about destruction, devastation, putrefaction wherever it went. Nothing felt any of the dreadful changes in this world other than those caught beneath. The ground and earth, that remained unchanged, even still now.

Jareth watched as the land beneath the towers went to ruins, with great walls cracking and collapsing as their structures started giving in from the poison. He heard the anguished wails as it descended and it filled his insides with such dreadful despair, that he began to wish for his own.

He started making notes, writing furiously in the pages, cataloging everything he observed. Every horrible, gut wrenching change to each human. Even if it meant doing so by studying his dying friends.

"It flies... like no other creature," Jareth spoke to his page, voice growing fainter each time the wretched scent touched his lungs. "Venom is… atypical, a biological deviation… or corruption," his pen scratched across his dying ledger, desperately.

Jareth poured over countless theories. A mutation of some sort? A corruption of an already vile beast, corrupted into something even more disgusting. Nothing made any real, logical sense. Not that anything like that did make sense anymore anyway.

But, he knew this wasn't some mere animalistic mutation. This felt different, somehow darker. Something twisted.

His body gave its tell, the tell tale signs were already setting in with the growing aches within his joints, with his breathing grew difficult, even when sitting and doing nothing at all. It became evident, his time was soon at an end.

He continued to study the creature, but he soon forgot why. Did he think to help them? How could one help the people when the skies were no longer the blue hue of an untouched land. He just watched and documented the end.

Jareth looked to the night sky. The venom clouded the stars with an awful sort of toxic haze, even this sky he studied with passion felt dead and barren and void, an empty gaze cast out at the cosmos with no reciprocation.

His vision started going dark, a growing, putrid circle beginning at his periphery, closing in at the edge of his perception, it threatened to swallow all. Still, he did not stop.

Jareth went down his lists of animals, each species one by one. His work, each creature felt so pointless in this present situation, their existence rendered insignificant, their forms turned into some old forgotten, meaningless fable.

His pen grew heavy, the letters were no longer straight. He began to scrawl and every scrawled word felt like a betrayal of what it once was. Of what his craft once stood for. But he could no longer control it, like a child scribbling in their journal.

"It… doesn't want us… it doesn't… understand…" the ink blotched with every labored word, for Jareth understood then that it wasn't driven by logic nor by hunger, it was just simply… hatred, directed to all living things equally, a sick and perverted purpose.

His gaze shifted. It was then when he spotted it in his peripheral. It swooped past the tower window, a horrifying silhouette in the night. It circled slowly and steadily and purposefully, that awful toxin making the very walls appear like it had begun to slowly, dreadfully melt.

It was the very beast of destruction itself, right there. And the very serpent now became the absolute object of all of his attention. It was everything in his very limited scope of view and for a very short moment.

The serpent, no longer driven by an unknown desire, landed gently on the edge of the window, peering directly into his tired gaze, into the soul of the once vibrant and dedicated scholar, with cruel indifference, no care and absolute malicious purpose.

Its venom dripped down, sizzling on the stone of Jareth's window, a horrifying dance of acidic material, a testament to all the awful changes that this world now had to undergo. It looked him over, with the horrible unbridled hunger of an unearthly power.

"Why… why?" Jareth mouthed, with great effort, more a feeble prayer, than a genuine question.

The serpent made no sound, but that awful, vacant gaze said everything and he understood everything. It didn't understand why. It didn't need a reason. Its nature had corrupted its intentions into that of horrible maliciousness.

Then, the creature brought itself fully into the window, its entire length snaking through and filling the entire room, scales dragging through everything in the path as the monstrous size of it had suddenly been displayed in full horrific grandeur.

Jareth was pinned by the monster, pinned with every cruel and twisted muscle as it wound and constricted and consumed every corner and shadow within that once lonely room of knowledge.

His fingers clenched onto his pen as they finally started losing feeling from lack of oxygen and an excess of vile fluids beginning to creep inside him and corrode every nerve and cell.

His lungs begged for air. The acidic fluid felt like it was melting him from within, an overwhelming sense of dread settled inside, replacing the desire for anything but the end. But there was not an end, only that one awful moment repeating and looping as Jareth remained suspended within its death embrace.

Then the creature tilted its head, and a new dreadful reality occurred, with horrifying finality, and with the end Jareth's mind ceased any further calculation or critical thinking, not in this horrid death that kept itself at a slow, tormenting pace, with putrid finality.

It released its poison from all its pores, and it came down upon Jareth in droves, a torrential wave of putrid acid soaking through every pore of skin and bone, through to muscle, brain, nerve and even memory itself, eroding his very spirit. It made every sound and sense of pain mute as Jareth could no longer identify what the feeling or pain actually meant.

Jareth did not scream, not did he thrash, his very system had been taken beyond the capability of it doing so. He felt as his body melted with that horrific sensation as he became simply part of it all now. Part of the serpent's grotesque will.

Then everything that was once Jareth, the scholar of all, his mind, and form became one with all of the decay and all the pain as his body and its last moment fell victim to the same twisted, corrupt purpose that drove that once meek snake to horrible monstrosity. It became part of its terrible ambition. Part of that cruel design, forever lost within.