BEHIND THE DOOR
A nightmarish short story about a hivewing couple with a dark secret, based on the story featured in the second part of this episode of Lore. It starts around the 8:30 mark.
WARNING: The following contains gore, body horror, and nightmarish material definitely NOT appropriate for all audiences.
Centipede was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and powerful. Her husband, Millipede, was a prominent doctor, and her family was one of the richest in Bloodworm hive. But the most noteworthy aspect of her was the parties she threw at her massive mansion. Guests dined off the most exquisite silverware and furniture on the continent, surrounded by the finest weavings money could buy and chatting with social elites from across the hive. And all of this was made possible by dozens upon dozens of silkwing servants. This was during Wasp's reign, after all.
It was a beautiful sight, but it was also a facade hiding a dark truth. And that facade would show its first crack not long after Centipede's rise to prominence in hivewing high society, in the form of a 6-year-old dragonet who'd been working as a servant in the manor that toppled out of a window and landed on the street with a sickening crunch, dead.
Centipede claimed that the servant had merely slipped and fell out the window, but the numerous lacerations and bruises on the dead dragonet's body made it obvious that this was a lie. A second silkwing servant, on the other hand, told a MUCH different story, one that was much more believable.
The dragonet, the servant claimed, was in the kitchen and had just accidentally burnt Centipede's favorite dish right as she had walked in. Furious with the tiny dragonet, she extended her claws and fell upon the dragonet, clawing and beating him with a shocking level of viciousness. The dragonet managed to slip Centipede's grasp and dashed away, Centipede chasing him all the way up to the third floor. Cornered in a room, the dragonet climbed out onto a balcony, slipped, and fell to his death.
But, despite the dragonet's wounds serving as grim testimony to the fact that the servant was telling the truth, the hivewing guards chose to believe Centipede's story, and she weaseled out of the tragedy without so much as a fine. Her reputation, though, was tarnished, and the entire affair would serve as a grim preview of the horrors that occurred behind the doors of Centipede's mansion.
Two years later, a fire broke out in the mansion's kitchen. Neighbors grabbed water buckets, entered the mansion, and made short work of the blaze... but when the smoke cleared, they found a silkwing servant chained to the stove.
She was bloody, with cuts all over her body, and she was slumped on the floor as if dead or unconscious. When they released her from her chains, she told them her story. She'd committed a minuscule slight that had inexplicably thrown both Centipede and Millipede into a rage, and after brutally beating her, they had chained her to the stove. The two of them frequently took servants who disagreed with them to a room on the third floor, never to be seen again, and the silkwing, fearing that they'd take her to that room, had turned it on, trying to light the house on fire in hopes of killing herself and taking the mansion down with her.
And though the neighbors had stopped the fire, she did succeed at bringing the mansion down around its owners, albeit only in a figurative sense. The neighbors went looking for this room, but when they found it, they discovered that the door was locked, bolted shut from the outside. But beyond the door, they could hear moans of pain, pleas for help, and the rattle of chains.
Arming themselves with crowbars, they tore the lock off the door and pulled it open. Many likely suspected this was some kind of prison cell, that horrible things occurred in there... but still, nothing could prepare them for what they found behind the door.
The overwhelming stench of decay and rot and death washed over them from the open doorway, and they stumbled back. When they recovered and beheld the contents of the room, some of them vomited right there in the hall. Others muttered prayers or curses.
Inside the room, there were bodies. Some were dead on the floor, flies buzzing around their rotting limbs, and some were still alive, struggling weakly against the chains securing them to the wall or keeping them hanging from the ceiling. All of them, though, had been tortured. Bones had been broken and reset, flesh had been cut and stitched, talons and limbs removed.
It seems that Centipede and Millipede had been experimenting on some of their servants. Any of them who defied them, dsobeyed them, or failed to serve in an appropriate manner would be brought to this room and subjected to unspeakably horrible punishment. And none brought into this room had ever left it alive.
Documentation on the extent of the experiments are scarce, but local legends have happily filled that blank, going into horrible detail as to what Centipede and Millipede did to their unfortunate victims. One, they say, was a silkwing dragonet barely 4 years old, her wingbuds and undeveloped silk glands violently ripped out. Another was a fully grown silkwing that had a hole in his skull, full of maggots, and was apparently still alive when they found him. A third supposedly had to be carried out by the rescuers, her limbs broken and reset at such odd angles that they were utterly useless.
But take away the sensationalized stories, and the core truth remains, still just as horrifying as before. Centipede and Millipede had so little regard for their silkwing servants that they treated them like laboratory animals, butchering and mutilating them without the slightest hint of remorse over the suffering they caused. Mistreatment of silkwings was alarmingly common, especially so in Bloodworm hive, but even the cruelest hivewings couldn't even begin to compare to this nightmarish pair. And when the story reached the public, hivewings and silkwings alike were as outraged as they were horrified.
Centipede and Millipede were promptly captured by authorities and publicly executed in front of a record-breakingly huge croud of onlookers, but their mansion still stands, and it kept telling the stories of the pair's victims, over and over.
Bodies continued to be found under the floors and inside the walls of the mansion for years afterward. Some estimate the death toll to be maybe 50, others put it in the neighborhood of 300 silkwings, though the latter estimate seems a bit of a stretch for a highly public mansion in the middle of Bloodworm hive. But death on a truly horrifying scale did take place there, and it left more than just corpses behind.
There are still reports of sounds from inside the mansion, some claiming to have heard pained moaning or cries for help. The few willing to actually stay in the mansion often report the sound of rattling chains and burning flesh. And some have seen things.
Some see ghosts of the victims, their horrible wounds clearly visible. Others see ghosts of Centipede and Millipede, charging through the house in a rage, claws extended and teeth bared. But the most common sighting is that of a 6-year old silkwing dragonet, bleeding from numerous cuts and running through the mansions twisting corridors, repeating the final moments before his fall to his death over and over and over again.
The End.