Flayed to Black

An offshoot from #269: Untold Short Tales of the Lair Legion: Between the Lines, or Untold Consequences

Originally posted on Tales of the Parodyverse.

Characters in this story are owned either by myself, or other posters on
the Board.

Black hung in space, suspended in the Shoggoth's minor biomass. Behind them, the stars appeared to burn with more than their usual brightness. Before them was nothing but a small, dark planetoid against a backdrop of eerie darkness, where no stars could be seen.

He had spent enough time in the Shoggoth's biomass to have recovered from his injuries at Mumphery Wilton's hands. He had also recovered some of his composure.

"This is your idea of revenge?" sneered Black. "Marooning me on a lonely planet? That fool Wilton had more imagination than this when he buried me alive."

No. replied the Shoggoth. We promised the one called Asil Ashling that we would deal with you appropriately.

"How? You can't kill me. I am immortal! I have all eternity to escape and take my revenge. If the old fool is no longer immortal, I can still enjoy destroying his descendants - and he won't be around to stop me!"

Ah yes. Eternity. We are still amazed that you chose to live somewhere so small, rather than pass on to the next stage of your existence. Besides, who said that was a planet?

There was a pause, as the Shoggoth took careful aim.

I think that even Wilton would have spared you this. it commented, as it spat Black out of its biomass.

No longer protected by the Shoggoth's biomass, Black's body was exposed to the forces surrounding them.

Now exposed to the vacuum of space, his blood vessels ruptured as his blood both boiled and froze at the same moment; He probably never knew how badly his body was scarred with radiation burns from the stars behind them; He tried to scream, but his breath was torn from his lungs.

Finally, as gravity began to affect him, still living, he began the long fall towards the surface.

His body fell, twisting and spinning. As it fell closer to the dark mass, the body was spun and shredded by the tidal forces surrounding it. First the body and limbs were rendered into fragments; then those fragments were rendered into their component atoms, which were in turn shredded and fused into a featureless soup of neutrons.

Finally, what remained of the matter that had formed his body was smeared out in a thin layer on the surface of the dark mass.

One day, the rest of the Universe will be in there with you, and eternity will come to an end. the Shoggoth told him. Until then, that which is not dead shall eternal lie.

It's mission complete, the Shoggoth passed back across the event horizon.

Behind it, what remained of Black screamed; a damned soul in the heart of the black hole.

Footnotes:

Most of the fun in writing these things is the research...

The concept of a Black Hole is not a new one by any means. Newtonian Physics defines the Escape Velocity as the speed at which an object must travel to break free of the gravitational influence of a planet. In 1783, one John Michell, a geologist, sent a paper to the Royal Society describing a body large enough that the escape velocity would exceed that of light. In 1796, LaPlace published "Exposition du Systeme du Monde" which included a similar theory - it was removed in later editions.

The whole idea was not taken seriously as the scientific community believed that light was a massless wave, and therefore not affected by gravity. It is doubtful that Erskine Black or Mumphrey Wilton would have learned about them in school.

It was not until around 1915 that Einstein produced the Theory of General Relativity and showed that light was indeed affected by gravity. Karl Schwarzschild, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Robert Oppenheimer and H. Snyder all added to the theory, but it was not until the late 1960's that the work of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose showed that the theoretical concept of a Black Hole was a general result of the equations, and thus likely to exist.