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The two-headed rat scuttled across the floor of flesh; a floor sticky with blood, reeking of decay, pulsating with life; but as the rat stopped, licked one of its paws and seemed to contemplate this, a great hairy foot came down and crushed the rat, squashing its bones to mush.  The foot pulled away with a smacking sound; the rat aware in its dying throws of something swallowing him.  The two-headed rat died as the flesh floor ingested the rodent whole.
             
The owner of the hairy foot let out a hearty laugh and sat down upon his throne, the seat groaning under the heavy bulk.  Like the floor, it was also alive.
           
Jolus the Malignant scraped the rat entrails from the underside of his foot on the rubbery step of his throne.  He looked up at the two small people staring at him, their eyes daring him to order them to do something, but at the same time in abject terror of hearing him shout at them again.  He smiled devilishly.
           
“Slaves, bring me food now!” he screamed at them.  They disappeared and shortly appeared with two others of the same species, carrying big silver trays heaving with food.  They laid the trays delicately upon the scabby steps for fear of spilling any of the food: they knew if they did, the fate the rat had suffered would pale in comparison to what they would suffer.  The four disappeared and returned seconds later, each bearing a single large bladder of red wine.  Again the greatest effort was made not to spill any of the precious liquid that had come from afar.  Unfortunately, the youngest and smallest of the slaves, Bent was his name, spilled a few drops. 

No one said anything and Jolus the Malignant didn’t erupt in rage, so Bent acted as if nothing had happened and turned to follow the others back to the kitchens.  After three steps he felt a burning hand grip his shoulder, the talons sinking deep into his flesh.  He looked to his shoulder, but didn’t see Jolus the Malignant’s skin-torn hand grasping him; he saw an dark red light clinging to him in the shape of a hand.

“You spilled the wine again, boy!” Jolus the Malignant roared at Bent’s back, knocking him to his knees with this powerful red light.

The red light now gone, Jolus the Malignant turned his raised hand so that the palm was facing Bent.  Like a puppet, the little man was lifted up off the flesh floor and forcefully turned to face the throne.  The King of Pain brought his hand towards him, making Bent come forwards with a magical force, the slave’s legs dragging along the floor in submission.  Jolus the Malignant pushed his hand out when the slave was within a foot of his thrown, stopping the helpless Bent in his tracks.  He dropped his hand back to the armrest and the slave fell to the floor with a painful thump.

“Do you realize,” Jolus continued shouting at the shriveling slave, “the lives it cost to get me that wine.  And you just blatantly go about spilling it everywhere, as if we have a never ending supply.”

Bent tried to face Jolus the Malignant and couldn’t.  He tried to open his mouth to make some plea in his defense, but couldn’t do that either.  All he could do was lay himself before his master in supplication.

“It’s people like you,” Jolus the Malignant spat at the sniveling runt, “that make me so mad.” 

He could control himself no longer.  Jolus the Malignant stood from his throne, raised his arms high to the ceiling – where a chandelier of bone looked down upon him, its candles of human fat all lit – collecting all the energy in the castle, and brought them down in a swift movement, his hands pointing like spearheads towards the slave.

Twin red beams burst forth from his fingertips and encapsulated the shivering creature.  A sizzling sound began, joining Bent’s tortured screaming, while the red light grew stronger, turning to yellow and then white.  A blistering heat was coming off the ball of light, while Bent continued to scream, then all went quiet.

Jolus the Malignant sat back down with a squelching sound.  In the place where Bent had been there was only a black scorch mark.

“Sometimes,” Jolus the Malignant began, his breath returning to normal, “I wonder why I don’t just kill all you damned Ewlaps.” 

He picked up one bladder and drained it, throwing it into a dark corner where something hidden reached out, grabbed, and started munching on it. Then Jolus the Malignant began consuming the large feast before him.

“There’s nothing like a killing to rouse one’s appetite,” he whispered to himself as he chewed away on some dead animal.

The other three Ewlaps remained safely hidden within the confines of the kitchen.  They closed the door to shut out the munching-crunching sounds. 

The Ewlaps had once been a peaceful, innocent people who traveled the great lands of Aisis Lip.  Jolus the Malignant had enslaved them with his armies.  There had been some ten thousand of them, and now the dwindled numbers that remained all worked for Jolus the Malignant.  However many of them were left the three knew not; Jolus might as well have killed them all.

“Ahhhhhhrrrrrggggg” growled Jolus the Malignant, the signal to the slaves.  Barely ten minutes had passed as the slaves opened the kitchen door and scampered out to do their master’s bidding. 

“Listen to me!” cried the repugnant creature.  They all stared, shivering with fright.  He smiled: two slices of stretched rotting liver. 

Jolus the Malignant was quite the ugly beast: shaped like a question mark, his back arched over, perhaps from some agonizing freak accident during birth, leaving his spine shaped like a hook, the vertebrae sticking out of his sickly-pale skin.  Patches of long black greasy hair hung from his gray liver-spotted scalp; clumps of this greasy hair also covered parts of his body.  His forehead was severely distended, a grid-face of blackheads.  His eyes were large and bulbous, the pupils a cold, heartless black.  His nose hung on his face like something squashed and mutated.  A pointed chin jutted out from his long face, moldy-green bristles sprouting from it.  His branch-thin arms hung from a husk of a body and settled on the rests of his throne, while long stick-like fingers stuck out, dangling sharp nails. 

Nevertheless, through all this hideous disfigurement, he still bore startling similarities to Kyra’s brother.  A similar facial structure, the way the hair hung, and that wooden bone of an earring dangling from his right ear; its symbolism meaningless, but its indication undeniable.

Jolus the Malignant decided he’d left the Ewlaps in abject terror long enough.

“For a thousand torturous years,” he began, “I have sat upon this throne of pain, in a castle of decaying flesh, on a mountain of death, in a kingdom of skulls and bones.  Over the long agonizing millennium I have meddled with the rest of Aisis Lip but few times, never causing any real harm or destruction.  That is about to . . .”

“What about us!” cried Pleg, Bent’s older brother.  “What about our suffering and toil from your accursed hands . . . ,” he wailed.

Before he could utter anything else, his friends jumped to his rescue, silencing him with a covering hand and dragging him back. 

But the damage had been done.

“I see.  This is how you feel.”

Jolus the Malignant was strangely calm; Pleg actually preferred him when he was vicious and demented, this way he didn’t know what was going to happen.

“Very well then.  I would like you to meet a new creation of mine.  You two, leave the one who has insulted me and go back into the kitchen.  Now!”

The other two knew they had no chance of saving Pleg and preferred themselves alive.  They dutifully dropped Pleg and rushed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind them.

Jolus the Malignant stood up and stepped down from his raised throne, his feet squelching in the blood-soaked flesh floor, and walked towards the quivering Pleg.  The Ewlap started crawling away from him and Jolus the Malignant raised his right hand and pushed outwards sending a blue ball of light which wrapped around Pleg like a giant claw and then disappeared, but the Ewlap soon realized he was paralyzed with no chance of escape.

“Now, about that new creation of mine,” the evil man said, smiling again in that disturbing way.  “It has taken me a few months to create, mainly because I had to find certain . . . ingredients that could only be found in distant lands.  Things like the heart of the death masque, the intestines of the black death eater, and, of course, the brain of a doom rat.”

The smile was still there, waiting for any sign of defiance from the helpless slave.  Just a little twitch of rebellion and Jolus the Malignant would pounce.

“These names are probably as foreign to you as freedom, but you will soon come to know what they have come together to create.  Very soon.”

Smiling wider now, with the twinkle of the right fang: a spark in the red cavity: “And now I give you Sludge.”

A misshapen snake twelve inches in diameter writhed out from a hole in the wall.  It quickly slithered up to the helpless Ewlap, opening its great maw, the fangs stretching wide, dripping oily black poison; another head rose out from the throat of the vile snake, then it opened its mouth: two great jaws spread open before Pleg, with rows upon rows of teeth running back down the throat; from this deep black throat came a slimy green tentacle, searching for something to satiate its incessant hunger.

Sludge didn’t slither forward and gobble up the Ewlap – it  didn’t rush its feasting and killing, for that would be too quick and painless.  Instead, the serpentine creature slowly wrapped its voluminous coils around poor Pleg who'd opened his mouth to scream multiple times, but could only cough at the ceiling. 

Sludge with its inferior brain finally admitted that its primal instincts of torturing its prey had gone on for long enough and made a lunge: not with its fangs extended, but with its mouth closed and sharp nose pointed at Pleg.  Sludge hit the Ewlap in the forehead, its sharp nose impaling Pleg and pushing him to the flesh-floor. 

Once the Ewlap hit the ground, the floor began making a sucking sound as it fervently tried to ingest him, but Jolus the Malignant and even Sludge knew the flesh-floor would not be able to swallow something this big with its many small mouths: the two-headed rat was its limit.

Sludge opened its four jaws wide and like any normal snake began swallowing the Ewlap whole.  It started at the top, wrapping its distended mouths around the entire head of the Ewlap, using its bottom jaw which was split in two pieces to move the food along its mouth and down its gullet, forcing the still-wriggling Pleg down into its stomach, where he would be digested alive.

Jolus the Malignant still had the smile slathered on his face as he walked back to his throne and sat down.  He watched the impressive display of his new creature eating its first prey.

Five minutes later, Sludge had a very large shape about three feet along its body.  The Ewlap was still paralyzed: moving nothing and feeling everything.  The creature turned and looked at Jolus the Malignant and then leisurely slithered back towards its hole which it just barely managed to squeeze through with its full stomach.

The King of Pain was quite tired after this eventful morning, but he still had to let the prisoners of his fortress know his plans. 

“My creatures of the dark, beasts of hidden places, and yes, all the Ewlaps, come before me now.”

They all came, swiftly, without hesitation.  From every corner and crevice of the room, from the darkest deeps of the castle to the highest reaching towers.  Their master’s voice was one that could be heard throughout and was immediately obeyed.  Creatures of all shapes and sizes, some with skin, some with hair, some with fur; some without one or other, some without all: a loose collection of organs and tissues barely existing.  No matter how crippled, they came to him.  Running, crawling, squirming and wriggling.  Little time past and soon the great room filled with minions of every kind imaginable and plenty from you darkest nightmares.  All the Ewlaps came too, even those who were wounded or maimed; they knew they wouldn’t last long if they didn’t come.  Jolus the Malignant would know.  They were at his beck and call, and they’d now been summoned. 

A silence descended upon the room, broken only by the fidgeting of the creatures that were unable to hold the same pose for more than a second.  They all waited to do their master’s bidding.

“As you know, for a long time I have suffered and waited and waited, but now that time is at an end.  I feel it in my bones and in the bones and skin of this castle.  We are all ready to take what is rightly ours.  Aisis Lip has been left alone for too long, with its happy peoples going about their business.  Except for the Ewlaps, of course,” he said this looking at the two servers who were terrified but loyal. 

“Aisis Lip is now ours for the taking.  And with you,” Jolus the Malignant said, looking not just at the pitiful Ewlaps but all the other creatures in the living room, of all shapes, sizes and proportions.  He would use them all, eventually, in his work.  He would also begin work on his next creature, Quark, who he would need in the near future, he didn’t know what for, he just knew that a new creature was needed.

“Together we will defeat this world, and then all will be mine.”

On the day Kyra first traveled into Aisis Lip, the nauseous discomfort Jolus the Malignant had been feeling for some time weakened somewhat and he finally started to understand what was going on with him.  It all tied in with her.  There was some sort of invisible, indefinable connection between them.  Jolus the Malignant now understood that this strange connection had actually existed before Kyra entered this world; it had even existed for the whole time he had lived in Aisis Lip, like an old scar that one didn’t know one had and never completely healed.  However, when she came into this world this scar had burst open; Jolus could feel her, very far away.  He wasn’t sure exactly where – Enchantus Palace, he guessed – but he could feel her existence constantly.

By the end of the day, he began to accept this blight that fate had dealt him.  As long as he felt her presence, he wouldn’t rest at ease.  She would be the one detail to make his plan to dominate Aisis Lip come crashing down, he just knew it.

It was during the evening of this horrible day that the event happened which had shaken him to his very core.  As he ate his dinner of almost raw roast beast, it had struck.  On his tenth bite he’d rocked backwards on his throne, slamming his back and head into the cold stone, jarring his senses.  He’d ricocheted forward, knocked over the table holding his dinner and fallen to the floor, doubled up, writhing.  He’d held his head in his hands, the pain excruciating.

In his mind, he saw her for the first time.  He’d materialized, in his mind, above a lake.  With his eyes tightly closed, his dinner long forgotten, it actually felt like he was there, hovering over the lake with her watching him.  One second he’d been enjoying his meal, the next he’d been yanked into this place.  Anger was bursting free in his mind, white rage flooding his face.  Absolute fury was the message he sent her, as he started growling and snarling, trying to get at the girl.

He’d lunged and got close to the shore, but she disappeared.  Less than a second later, the lake and everything around it had disappeared also and he’d opened his eyes to see the table on its side, with the dinner spread all over the floor.  He could see the mouths of the floor consuming it, chewing and crunching and trying to swallow it all.  His head was beating with a new level of pain.