The Pit Of Nergal

A horror lingers in the minds of every man that is sent to Nergal. Deep inside the prison is a spine-chilling place that holds the spectral secrets to death and the blinding mysteries to life. Its macabre imposition is an abominable pit to the forsaken captives that are sent to the chasm of their interminable hell of hideosity.

Few men have survived the brutal wrath of its insanity, and manifold men of sundriness have vanished into its cavity of no return. The agonising echoes of screams are heard resounding, throughout the merciless pit of evil. One by one the souls of condemnation are sent to their discernible doom. It is an unbearable place synonymous, with irrepressible death and desolation. It is said that no man escapes, the haunting pit of Nergal.

It was the year 2168, when I was sent to Nergal. Its location was secretive, and no man knew where to find it on a map, but those that were sent there could describe its unrelenting terror. Of me you will know that I was just a prisoner with the number 88 on my back, and of the account of my life that I shall narrate, know that I disclose my private hell with the admission of the truth.

The reason why I was sent there is insignificant, for I was an unwilling participant and prisoner. What is of significance, is what I had experienced that was unmatched and transpicuous in its nature. There are no reasonable explanations that could asseverate the position of the truth, except its horrifying sequence. I did not revel in the misery of others. I had simply observed the fear in their eyes, as they were taken to the inextricable pit of death.

After a week, I had been taken away from my dungeon in shackles, on to another that was solitary and wretched. It was there, where I would listen to the incessant hours of horror from the abyss of the pit of Nergal. Those terrible sirens that were the precursor and cessation, to the ceaseless screams of death that deafened and disquieted the minds of sanity. No man alive knew what had laid, beyond the lethiferous pit.

There were only suppositions of conjured images that were disturbing, in the deleterious peril of their illusions. Blood was its avatar, and human flesh was the satisfaction of its voracious hunger. Some would say that there was a hideous beast that was lurking at the bottom of the pit, while others would say that there was a vortex sucking up the souls of the condemned sent to Nergal.

I could not see passed the edge of my dungeon, but I could imagine the suffering and cruelty the men would have to bear unwillingly there. It is said that the worst punishment a man encounters in that profound pit, is the thought of the unspeakable fear that is Nergal.

Since my time in this new dungeon, I had counted with a stone marked on the wall below the oubliette of the dungeon, twenty men dead within 24 hours—none of which I had known their names or had seen their faces before. I did not know their crimes or their sins, but I was aware that all who were sent to the pit of Nergal would never return alive. Their bodies were never buried or discovered.

This I was apprised by several of the captives who had been told this information. Whatever misfortune, these men had been subjugated to in the prison they did not deserve, such an inhumane outcome. My mind had tried endlessly to occupy my thoughts with rational thinking, but it was extremely difficult to not be affected, by the pending grasp of doom that was the ultimate chastisement, for all the captives that were sent to Nergal.

We were neoteric experiments of those who had captured us, and we were forgotten by the sanctimonious society that had ostracised us after the war. They had deemed judgement on our fate for our iniquities. We were numbers that were placed on our backs, and our entire history was erased, when we had taken our first step inside the old fortification to be processed.

Every man that was condemned to Nergal would never see a day of freedom again, or breathe its sheer excitement. I would often sit there in my unwanted solitude and reminisce, about the zoetic memories I had experienced, before I was sent to Nergal.

There was not much I could do to prevent my appointed date with the pit of Nergal. All of the captives were appointed their time, but none of us were told when that exact day would be. I had counted the days of my imprisonment on the scribable walls of my dungeon. Perhaps, it was morbid of me to count the days until my demise.

It was the only leisure that I had afforded to me that was of my own volition. We were not allowed to step outside of the dungeon. What had surrounded it was a moat, with deadly spikes to thwart the attempt of any escape by a prisoner. No man in the time that I was there had ever escaped.

The bold and defiant ones would lose their courage, upon seeing the massive spikes present with rufescent blood. During the day and night, the deafening sirens would echo and release its terror upon the prisoners. It also was the time, when an unfortunate prisoner would meet his death in the pit of Nergal.

Pity was never intended to be demonstrated to the prisoners, and atonement was never permitted to be effectuated. All that the prisoner knew was that he would be taken to his gruesome death. It was a grueling experience that no actual words could measure its ineffable description. I could only avow for what my eyes had witnessed and what my ears had heard. It was a constant despondency, amidst the dismal gloom.

The once hyaline sky was the sign of former days of halcyon glee, then erased by the memories of worthless tragedy. Many men went mad in the dungeons, while others committed suicide. It was said to me that madness and suicide were far better options than the death within the pit of Nergal.

Upon a cold day, I was awakened by the awful screams of a poor soul that was beside my dungeon. He had been attempting to communicate with me, but the guards were always vigilant and present with their technology. We were their particular amusement and they were the revelers of our torment and throes. They were myrmidons of a higher power. We were deemed inhuman and cast off by the self-righteous zealots of society.

Upon this day, it was his day to meet the inscrutable face of death. I sat there still listening, as the guards had come for him to escort him to the ancient pit of Nergal. Through the faint light that I had of my front door, I could see him pass by me. The siren had indicated that his death was imminent and unavoidable. It was the call to Nergal. There was nothing that could save the poor man. His fate was already sealed.

It was another body to add to my senseless count of doomed prisoners sent to their death. I sat still at times with the resignation of my quandary. I had begun to prepare myself, for the eventuality of my date with the pit. It was not something that I had desired or had fully embraced as a possibility, nevertheless, it would arrive without much ado. The rations that we were fed were just enough to keep us alive and the water we drank was from an old well that was putrid. We were not granted any access or usage to modern technology.

Our beds were extremely rough and hard. We had only one pillow made from hay to rest our heads upon, during the day and night. The hopeless isolation was affecting my mind and slowly debilitating my body, as well. The stress and the pressure were nothing more than my reality gone astray.

When I was not sitting on my bed nor floor, I would be pacing in the dungeon nervously pondering at length like a solivagant, the consequences of my actions that brought me to this place and the implausible salvation of my soul. I was a mere mortal, whose mortality was predestined to its inexistence and inextricable result. I was a practical man of principles, but that could not save me from the wrath of the pit. I was a prisoner of war.

It was difficult to imagine that I was reduced to the most animalistic part of my fading humanity. Sleep was only a transient time to rest and escape my dreadful reality that was the fever of living. I could do nothing more than that. I had to deal, with the intolerable sirens and screams of the other captives constantly.

Dreams were but insane hallucinations conjured in my mind, to avoid the gorgonising effects of the ominous omen that had foreshadowed my demise. I could sense through the recesses of the Stygian chambers of Nergal, the eldritch sound of death and smell the putrefaction of decomposing bodies of those that were thrown into the endless pit of Nergal.

It was a gory and funest spectacle to witness, with such amazement. There was a part of me that had wanted to go insane, and the other part that wanted to rid myself of this horrendous imprisonment. In the end, I was forced to accept the despicable reality of the dungeon, but the unyielding sirens that blared would make me begin to question the core of my sanity afterwards.

Time was the measurement of my captivity, and it had allowed me only the distraction of moments of bygone memories at intervals. I had assumed that most of the men that were around me had been prisoners long before, I had arrived at Nergal.

I was aware of their attenuating condition, and I could imagine how deteriorated their mental faculties were, as mine were deteriorating slowly. Many aspirations had become fruitless and many agonies had transformed into lengthy minutes of no surcease. Pain was the face of my torment and the dungeon the embodiment of my lingering despair.

I was conscious of the effects of the weariness of the alienation, but the fear of being absorbed by the pit and the terror that existed in the pit was consuming me more than the lassitude. No prison could match the Lovecraftian horror of Nergal. It was simply incomparable in nature and distinctive in its fever of madness. Its vercordious grasp of reality was ever present in the psyche of all the men that were oppressed, in the cacoethic chambers of the dungeons of their phantasms.

It was not implausible to not sense the parlous episodes of death and consternation, for they were pervasive and minacious in their manifestation. I was an ordinary man that had survived the abominations of war, but I had found myself trapped in the zone of no return. Thus, I was captured and sent to Nergal to face my death, as a sacrifice to the god Nergal. I had heard stories of the redoubtable god and how men had perished to its terrible hunger, but I had not seen it to believe in them.

As the weeks had passed and the months, I then became accustomed to the loud sirens. I feared that I had become deaf at that point and indifferent to the screams of the other prisoners. Had I succumbed to my internal madness, or had I died already mentally?

I would enter into an unconscious state of nightmares, when I would imagine my death, at the hands of the pit and the terrifying Nergal. The images in my head were too surreal, but they were real in their horrid manner of my depictions. I had begun to draw pictures of Nergal in the walls that encompassed me. Its darkled guise, its razor-sharp teeth and a bulging eye, with a black film were what I had remembered the most in my hallucinatory episodes. Was this a signal and evidence that my finality was approaching nigh?

More prisoners were sent to their cruel death. Soon my walls would be covered with abundant numbers or depictions of Nergal. I had survived the war of the nuclear bomb, but I had become a captive to the ruthless foes that had imprisoned me to a destiny that was marked for me from the beginning, as just another casualty.

War is never merely a game of winning and losing, for it is the harshness of the victor over the loser, and the consequence that the loser must bear regrettably, within a small measure of defiance. To be restricted to the solid confines of the achromaticity of a dungeon was only the consequence of my definite circumstance. It had no special attachment or actual meaning, except that of my heinous imprisonment.

One day, I had seen the figure of a prisoner trying to escape from the sturdy walls of the prison. I could hear his feet climb down the walls, with a stealthy anxiety in him. Within a few minutes that had elapsed, he would stumble and fall on to the sharpened spikes that had awaited him below. The sirens had sounded then. He had died instantly, upon his untimely fall. I do not know, how he managed to escape the chamber of his dungeon, but he did.

He had decided to risk his life and not be a sacrifice to the god Nergal. It had been a long time, since anyone had reached the point of where he had reached, in his attempt to escape the prison. For a moment it gave me a glimpse of hope, but quickly that hope would be dashed away, by the fact that he was not successful in his desperate attempt. I had admired his courage, in spite of the futility of his act.

My appearance had changed for the worse, and I was growing a long beard and long hair. I had been in that wretched prison for nearly a year. I supposed that it was their pleasure to torture and render us to the behaviour of wild animals, as prisoners of war. How any man could continue to survive under these appalling conditions was an absolute miracle.

I had to remind myself that despite the fact that I had lived for the period of almost the completion of a year, it did not signify that I would be spared of defunction. It had meant that I would continue to suffer and be exposed to the insurmountable madness of the dungeon.

I had lost some hearing as well, due to the loud sirens. At certain degrees of my sanity, I was capable of pondering the idea of my improbable escape. This would only result in drifting more and more, into the incessant maze of my hysteria and mussitations.

The echoes of the sirens had begun to damage my eardrums inside. I would often speak to myself incoherently. I do not know, if this is how delirium manifests. All that I shall expound is the fact that I was experimenting the illimitable realm of its imposture.

There are moments in time, when our mind decides to deceive us and make us believe in things that are not real in their creation or shape. The thoughts then began to enter my mind. Was I only dreaming about this amorphous horror? Was it just a nightmare of mine conjured? Death and madness were at the corner of my obsession to discover the truth.

I had believed that this is what kept me alive in my cerebration, during my time at the prison. It was a pathetic admission on my part, yet it was the veracity of my experience. I did not know, if Nergal was an actual god, or just a horrific deformity of a being created by humans.

Every day, a new prisoner would arrive, while another would be sent to his death. It was a predictable occurrence. Piles of skulls and bones had amassed outside the dungeon in a nearby chamber, as a fearful reminder of our terrible fate. Our enemy, who was intransigent was a masterful conniver of draconian oppression. The place that we were imprisoned was chosen to terrorise the prisoners. I had felt a certain amount of pity for them. Perhaps, it was more due to the serious nature of our imprisonment and punishment that had awaited us at the pit of Nergal.

Every day was a constant battle to extirpate the evil that was our condemnation and abalienation. I had utilised my intuition and instinct to guide me, when my mind could not process coherently my thoughts developed. I had learnt that I could not underestimate the capacity of the mind, or its debilitating effects exposed to enveiglement. The conception of freedom was no longer applicable.

The question that had persisted in my mind was, how long would I be able to continue sane and alive? I was left alone to cogitate the essence of that question and the plausibility of the answer. Nothing was more direful than the untoward predicament of my uncertainty.

If there was ever a time for my comprehension of the situation that was unfolding, then it was at that precise moment when I had realised that my time had finally arrived. It would not be what I had expected. I had expected my date with my death on another day, but for some unusual reason I was not prepared on that day.

Apprehension had begun to enter my mind immediately, as I began to shiver. It was a clear sign that my body had lost its strength and my mind its shelter. The contraction of doubt had consumed me, as my muscles had astringed. The door to my dungeon had opened wide and an austerulous guard had come to escort me to the abhorrent pit of Nergal and ultimately, to the denouement of my death.

The siren had sounded, and it was the indisputable indication that it was my time. I had spent all those months in abject despair and madness. The phlegmatic guard did not look into my eyes, and I had only stared ahead, knowing that I would not return to my dungeon never more. At that moment my fear had turned into a brief measure of resignation.

It was the unknown of the pit that had concerned and obfuscated me. No one knew what Nergal really looked like, in its actual guise and physiognomy. All that was known was hearsay and fearful tales of horror that few had ever lived to confirm their authenticity. I said my goodbye to the adamantine walls that had confined me.

The corridor was long and drear. It took me a whole ten minutes at least to be escorted to the pit of Nergal. Along the way, I had seen the sober faces of the other prisoners, who were watching me pass their chambers. They could sense the solitary steps that I had to endure to reach the obtenebrated pit.

I did not have time to fully contemplate their predicaments nor their individual tortures. I could only think of my terrible situation, while I walked the inexorable path surrounded by the lambent torches. As I was taken down the stairway that led to the imminent chamber of the pit, horripilation had caused me to shiver more, as the dread was more palpable. With every second passed, I felt my heart pounding with a maddening palpitation. No words could describe that exact moment in time.

The sirens had abated suddenly. Thus, it would seem as well was any hope of my survival. I had the fainting urge to escape, but my body was incapable of running away. I could hear the roaring voice of Nergal. I was to be a selected sacrifice to the ancient god.

My legs had buckled, and my arms had stiffened. The callous guards had prepared me for my death. I was supposed to be tossed into the pit and be devoured completely by Nergal. I was given no opportunity to repent for my peccability, or make one final declaration before my death. I could see plainly from above the vast pit a pitch-black nothingness, as I had stared at it with fright expressed in my eyes.

I had smelt the effluvium of cruor. I could not escape, for there was nowhere to run. I was marked for death. There was no time for the usage of my trenchant wit. I had to find a way out of my impending doom. One of the guards had then proceeded to toss me into the pit, but his feet would entangle with mine, and he would fall into the pit instead of me. The other guard would attempt to save him. It was too late; the first guard had fallen into the pit and directly into the mouth of Nergal. I could hear his vociferous screams, as he was falling. I did not have much time to react.

It was the moment for me to seize the advantage. With immediacy and urgency in my eyes, I had pushed the other guard into the horrible pit, causing his death as well. His screams of death were audible to my ears. I could vaguely see their bodies being devoured at the bottom of the pit, through the evanescent mist. It was a ghastly sight to bear and to hear. It was then that the ferocious leviathan of Nergal had risen from the bottom of the chthonian pit, through the enveloping mist. I saw a darkness that was covered in the absolute shade of dripping blood and had sprawling tentacles.

Its serpent tongue was long, its bulging eye had magnified, and its teeth penetrated like a sharp dagger. No assemblage of words could totally describe the horror that was Nergal in appearance. I was aghast by what I had witnessed. A third guard had entered, seeing what had developed in the camera. He had tried to throw me into the pit, before Nergal would escape its lair. As he tried, the sirens had blared, causing him to fall into the mouth of Nergal. He had dropped the keys that led outside the chamber of the dungeons. I had managed to pick them up and escape through the door and on to the corridor ahead.

There were anfractuous steps that led to a narrow passageway, whereupon climbing I had reached a secret tunnel that led to the exterior of the old fortification. Once outside of the tunnel, I had found myself in a strange forest. I had looked back once to see, if anyone had seen me depart. Apparently, no one had seen me flee. Nergal had then escaped from its pantagruelian pit and began to seek the human flesh of those that it could consume, as he comminuted everything in his path.

The remaining guards were occupied, with defending themselves from Nergal's attack that they did not have time to locate me. It was utter chaos back at the prison, and I could hear from the distance the horrifying echoes from the screams of the victims of Nergal. There was nothing for me to do, except escape.

I had walked aimlessly for hours through the thick trees and branches abstruded, until I had reached the edge of the forest. What I saw next before me was the image of another cimmerian pit. For a moment I had frozen. I had to go around the wide pit, if I was going to proceed forth. The horrid image of Nergal was still fresh in my mind, as I had stared at the mesmerising pit. There was no going back, or did I have sufficient knowledge in what direction to go.

I was extremely cautious and apprehensive. Gradually, I began to walk around the pit, hoping to advance and not fall inside it. I had no assurance that Nergal was not waiting for me to fall or to be grasped by its tentacles. The risk and danger were imminent, but I had proceeded.

In the end, I would walk, pass the pit and reach my freedom, but my nightmare had not ceased. I had continued forth, until I had discovered beyond the pit, there was nothing but total destruction. In the time that I was imprisoned, the war had begun again. This time, it was the sign of Armageddon. The end of the world, as it was known to me. The worse was yet to be discovered.

There were dead bodies of humans strewn on the ground everywhere, amidst the mephitic air. It was the prophecy of dystopia that was foretold by the sagacious elders of anteriority. They had foreseen and forewarned the world that man would destroy the planet, with his avidity for power, domination, and his acts of moral turpitude. There were toxic fumes of a mist that were creeping from the septentrional distance. I could not stay. I had to leave, before the toxicity would kill me. I headed back into the forest, and there before me stood the towering presence of the reboant beast of Nergal.

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