DERVISH MOST DEVILISH: THE DEMONIZATION OF THE GOBLIN QUEEN
By Quillon42
SOMETIME IN LATE 1988 (OR SO IT MAY WELL SEEM)
Sleekly and swiftly coursed the carbon-hued, ghastily-sneering carriage as it tore across one of myriad transmogrified Manhattan avenues. Within the evil, organic and unholy vehicle reclined the demon-doctored duplicate of a redhead revered obscenely by all who adventured under the aegis of the X. This diabolical dame Madelyne, a lady led appallingly astray, an alizarin-maned ideal gone tragically awry, she assessed the chaos occurring all around her, she allowing the most vicious, delicious of grins to issue from between luscious, lurid lips as the Queen considered all the damage wrought this night.
About six miles behind her by now, the shivered shards of superteams were tilting at one another, everyone from the intelligent Beast to the impulsive Longshot tangling, thrashing about in a typhoon of malice and malaise. This was a baker's dozen of do-gooders, all of whom had expeditioned in the name of Xavier at some time or another, from mere months to many moons past. But while they had one and all had regularly railed against those opposed to the Dream…now these thirteen were embroiled in a skirmish most skittish, with one abnormal alumnus of the Mansion against another, against another, against another.
And Madelyne, this iniquity-primed Pryor…she was reveling in all of it. What she had accomplished, this past year or two since her scarlet-shaded Slim had skipped out of her existence…it was nothing less than a smorgasbord of score-settling against those who had abused her, those who had abandoned her, those who attempted to take advantage and appropriate her sheer energies for their own ends.
There was her de facto "father," Mister Nathanial Essex Sinister. An encounter with this pallid pustule in Omaha had made overt the maddened woman's origins, made Madelyne realize that she was manufactured, that not so much born as assembled from so much filched genetic fodder. Despite learning that her life was a fabrication in more ways than one, the lady turned upon the cur who was her creator, snatched back the baby Nathan Christopher whom Sinister sadistically wished to study and have promote his own perverse agenda.
There was the putrid wizard N'Astirh, whose pony-profile had progressed from the most vomitesque shade of viridian to the goriest shade of garnet, over the course of the Infernal events that overtook the Empire State's most infamous isle. Though it was S'ym—a perfidious perpetrator the color and character of pansy—it was he who had been the one to actually convert Miss Pryor from circumstantial victim to contumacious vixen, it was the plan of the N'asty one all along for the lady to lead the demons from an otherworldly dugout of dread to that hotbed of homos both sapien and superior, the one known as Earth-616. In "gratitude" for such guidance through such a career of corruption, the Goblin Queen Madelyne lashed out at him with volleys of concussive force and cussing furor alike; no entity would control the woman, be it from this mortal plane or otherwise.
Then there was that squeaky clean jezebel Jean Grey herself. The one who was really as much a "mother" as Nathaniel Essex was "father" to her, given that Mads was made from the original redhead's flesh. But yea, just as today Cassandra Cage could disgustingly fatalize her own matriarch Sonya Blade, specifically in a selfie featuring the latter with jaw slackened and face otherwise utterly fucked, so too did Madelyne assay to destroy and demoralize the woman who brought her into this world. Should the Queen have her way this very evening, Pryor would become the proprietor of Madame Grey's pure heart, gushing with grue; her head, all ruddy red from hair to gore; her soul, a candlelight to snuff and safekeep in the dankest dimension imaginable.
Alongside that galling Grey, of course, was the topmost target on Madelyne's list: none other than the shite in shades himself, Scott Summers. When and not if the spell were activated at this evening's expiration, the Queen would quench her thirst for revenge ever most consummately upon the instant in which that polypompous Cyclops would bear witness to mutual child, Nathan Christopher, as he would be rent in twain by the Soulsword. This literal splitting of the baby would in turn shatter Hubby Summers, make that glowing-glanced fool fall onto his face all defenselessly, leave him ripe for an even crueler change of mind and body than anything Miss Pryor had put upon the Marvel Girl's mother and father. Then Madelyne would gladly abandon Scott in his twistedly-mutated state, run out on him as he did her, allow old John and Elaine to lay into him with gnashing, ghoulish incisors.
Even X-Acquaintances like Warren Worthington did not escape the wrath of this woman. Handily Maddy would take advantage of that dark angel as well, gather him up into her half-clothed arms, draw him in for a kiss that distorted that former Death horseman, change him in shape, psyche, and spirit in a manner that no Infectia could inflict upon any savage Beast. She would serve that high flier right, after all, for putting that call through to Anchorage and luring, snatching her spouse away from her in the first place; Mad in her malevolent, muddled mind could still smell the skillet that whipped up that last breakfast she ever shared with old Scotty.
Last and perhaps least, in terms of his potency anyway, was scrappy little Alex Summers. Really Madelyne considered the prospect of keeping him as her carnal companion for all time, once all the demons dropped in and assumed their rightful place. Who knew: hearing him all huffing in his hanging on, his dangling for dear life off the back off her hellcoach right now, his snazzy sable costume coming apart with each fiendish gust of wind…perhaps when she emerged, at the foot of that torrid, transmuted Empire skyscraper that stood as the spire for her new, noxious regime…she would deign to dub Havok her most hallowed Prince, and keep him after all.
Yes, it would be ever so gratifying to gloat over all those trounced, transformed figures who fucked her out of the life she should have had. Even now Maddy could see the base of the aforementioned ESB, that tower which would take her up and up and up, have her look down disdainfully over Manhattan, just as she did in the Rainbow Room a little bit ago…establish her as the regent of a new reign over mutant and the rest of humankind alike.
With a haughty flourish the merciless lady made for the doorknob to step out of her stagecoach of sin, she ready to encounter Alex outside and make him her consort, with his sable semi-shredded costume to complement her own revealing sultriness in sapphire.
Upon trying the handle, though
[RUDGE-A RUDGE-A RUDGE-A]
the door wouldn't defer to her Goblin Majesty, it instead holding fast…
…and with amber eyes now sprouting from the attached armrest, and glowering at her most untowardly, it dawned on this basest frau with bloody follicles that another, vile force was at work within her wagon.
"D…Driver! DRIVER!
"Release me from the carriage this instant!"
[RUDGE-A RUDGE-A]
Madame Pryor's Silvestrian hair-salon-poster-model facial features grew more and more flush, beat by beat as she battled against the diminutive gate to get out, she growing all the more frantic as she could swear she heard, at her nine o'clock, albeit at a great distance…
[RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA]
the foreboding sound of something large, and something heavy, and something alive headed straight the reprobate redhead's way was bearing down on her.
She looked out a cruor-colored window of the carriage to see a gigantic damask demon, cruising in her direction…that very same possessed subway train engaged by another belligerent ginger, a particular Man Without Fear to be exact, during this very same event. Only here, that same train was trucking its way along aboveground…
…right to the very position of the paused carriage containing that malevolent Madelyne.
[RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA]
[WAARRRGGG WAAAAARRRRRGGGGG]
Again with the insistent screaming to the front, almost in time with the unearthly whistle shivering out of that evil engine closing in. There was naught else the Queen could do, especially given that the recalcitrant door had now dug into her beautiful forearm with onyx fangs.
"Uuughh…Your Queen commands you!
"DRIVER…!"
And it was then that a small slat had opened up in the divider between said driver and damned patron. Miss Pryor then noted that the one commandeering the cruel cart was hooded, somewhat, garbed all in obsidian…yet still there peeked out, in the top half of the face, beige skin around earth-brown-irised eyes with very long, curtly-blinking lashes.
[SSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH]
Said face then seemed to dissipate into the ether, grain by grain like an organic etch-a-sketch in reverse.
Leaving the lurid lady in the rear all by her lonesome, all lined up for impact with the insidious engine bearing down, its Molochic mug a smothering maroonness that filled up the entirety of Madelyne's lefthand horizon…
[RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA RETCHETA]
[WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGG WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGG]
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG..."
…
…
…
But then…supplanting the traumatic crash that should have ensued in the midst of this bloodcurdling, Schwarzenegger-Eraser-plagiarizing sequence…
Madelyne Pryor felt herself almost…pestled apart, taken down into as many atomized iotas as that mysterious carriage-hand who hustled away most precipitously—precipitately?—at the last possible moment before that train tore through.
And now the titian termagant was ten thousand kernels the hue of ketchup, her essence fragmented umpteenhundredfold and ushered forcibly up into the infernally-besotted evening sky.
As pieces of Pryor progressed through the air, the lady's very spirit seemed to splinter apart as it was assailed by mere whispers, the encoded sentiments eroding her self-worth and tearing her apart more than any S'ym, Sinister, or Scott could ever hope to do.
They were sounds emanating from what she could swear was the happiest day of her life…or at least what she thought should have been such a day.
Did you see her face?
…
You could swear that she's basically the second coming.
…
…
He's only marrying her because she looks just like…
The playback of what must have been gossip ongoing between guests at her wedding reception had confirmed the worst for the woman, locked it in for her all the more that she was nothing more than a proxy in poppy, a surrogate in scarlet…
…a clone in crimson, all for the sake of keeping Cyclops content in his tentative retirement.
And if that didn't pan out, well, there was always the entrepreneurship involving eternal reign over a perdition-permeated planet…a devolution which would make Earth-616 verily live up to its beastly number indeed.
Her future had always been destined to be ever so bright and enterprising.
Now here she was again, Madelyne realized as she collected herself up, she garbed again in her olive flightsuit, a uniform honestly almost as alluring as her ravishing semi-cerulean, semi-flesh raiment during the Inferno.
And here she was once more, not in a carriage but rather a Cessna, she undertaking in the airways what she always did best—or at least what Mister Essex had programmed her to do best.
But as Mads looked out charily at the clouds ahead through the cockpit window, she noticed something disturbingly strange…
The cumuli in front of her were concentrated with that same, sandy saturation that utterly obfuscated the face of that midnight-swaddled maiden who spirited away from the demonic carriage, seemingly minutes ago.
Through the grainy trails the plucky, profligate pilot could swear she noted the cardinal, candy apple red slants and vectors of a very Eighties looking structure that was all too familiar. Yet not familiar, in its entirety…in its enormity in fact.
"This was the projection of the haven you always wished to have, with your husband, wasn't it, Miss Jea…er, well, Madam Madelyne.
"Wasn't it."
Slinking into the Pryor-flyer's ear now was the voice ever insistent, it slipping through like grit eking out from between a beachgoer's toes.
Before this drastic duchess of demons could even turn her head in the direction of the inflection, the grandiose sight burst in front of the woman, made itself known in full, commanding and capturing her attention almost hypnotically.
Looming ahead, indeed, was that Anchorage sanctuary the Queen had adored, had mourned all these months now, the abode which should have borne so many more moments for herself, Scott, and Nathan Christopher than the scant year or so that it actually afforded them.
Yet the house was now humongous, a Himalaya of a homestead, a domicile dominating the panorama. Maddy thought to take the craft upward, and endeavored with the controls; regardless, the plane's altitude maintained, unsettlingly.
"It's time for another homecoming, Milady. Just as you effected when you alighted at the Xavier Estate, towards the end of all our tales, and encountered my own hapless, niqab'd self in the foyer…"
And it was then, as the Cessna ceased its cruise control pace and started into a sprint towards the huge home ahead, the green-garbed Goblin Majesty began to sweat profusely, the first time she had done so since in labor with young Nathan.
Throttles and switches were wrenched in an effort to make the volant vehicle change course, but to no avail. Madelyne was locked into a collision course with the coziest memory she'd ever kept.
"You can't recall the time you visited us at the Xavier Estate, can you," prompted the voice, it seeping in again tantalizingly through the aural canals of the amaranth evil. "When I mistook you for your superior counterpart Lady Jean…when you took your exasperation of that all out on me."
Faint figments of this flew through Mads' mind now, of her going to the Mansion, with homicide in her heart, the object to take Scott out of this existence as she brought their son into it…of encountering some swarth-swathed lady, for all of a matter of seconds…of unleashing some sort of fury upon her, even though she was only an onlooker to her arrival.
In this unworldly sky now, jet verily enveloped jet as a pall of pitch overcame the craft in which the Queen was contained. Yea, utterly swaddled in black became the plane now…just as was the figure of the femme who was victimized when her Majesty made a most unwelcome homecoming at The End of the mutants' narrative.
"Honestly, Madame Maddy…you think you could have just out and out…vaporized someone, who herself can disintegrate into so many tiny motes…"
Now the airplane was merely two miles from the hefty dream home.
"Then take on my mantle in more ways than one to disguise yourself, assume my position, be the bodyguard to Scott and blast him in the back when he was off his guard."
One mile. And Madelyne, with her eyes widened enough to thoroughly scrunch up the evil emerald eye shadow she still wore beyond the kobold-KOed Manhattan, even though she was no longer in Goblin garments.
"Don't know what you were thinking…a pasty Caucasian like you, thinking her fair skin and green eyes wouldn't be borne out, even from within a burqa. Hhh…I guess that's what you get for being someone so accustomed to dressing so revealingly…then trying to go to the other extreme to dupe others."
Frenetically Lynne lashed out at the controls once more, finding no response from them one last time as the vehicle veered straight for a gargantuan rendition of her old master bedroom window.
She threw up olive drab arms, to shield against the shattering, the shredding to ensue…
[SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH]
"No."
[SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS]
then she found herself cascading, Mads did, her beauteous body tumbling end over end, and she in the same carnation-and-carmine homemaker duds in which she was bedecked that day in Anchorage…the day her husband received the phone call about her.
"I'm afraid that old stereotype, about what those from my background might do in this situation…it won't hold up today, Madame Madelyne…
"…no birds being flown into any buildings this time. If anything, I'm redeeming the image of such people of my origin."
These words just as the demon regent was dumped down, down…
…with the gossip grinding into her mind once again, mercilessly.
…
…She's just what we need to get out of Limbo; her perfect Phoenixness, but caged up with rage to boot. Get on it…recruit her, initiate her unholy assumption as Queen, faster'n you can say 'Belasco Tabasco'…
…
…
…My Marauders have failed me. I'll have to take her apart, study her, see where I went wrong, start with another, perhaps name her Madelyne Latter…
…
…
…
…Let's bring her back into publication. Have Hopeless travesty Inferno beyond anything which it resembled back in the day.
…
Madelyne didn't quite comprehend the speaker or situation regarding this last, but for some reason it infuriated her much more than any devil sorcerer or deadbeat spouse ever could.
Now she was descending into the depths of an oversized orifice of umber; it was a trap of taupe, a misery embossed in bistre.
And Mad was mired, enmeshed in its center, she sinking by the second, reaching up, out towards an executioner engulfed in ebony.
The latter stood vindictively nearby, her stygian-shrouded form safely aboard a barge sailing through this sea of seeming ash and grime.
"You've always been so much about airfaring, Madame…but apart from that awful episode with the giant squid or some such during your honeymoon, you've never been too into traversing the seas. Well, now you're going to become quite…immersed, should I say.
"Will you extend a hand towards me now, as you did at the Mansion when you blasted me down to my constituent scintillas? Can you summon up the same force bolts as you belted out back then?"
Of course, at this moment the devilish lady was desperate as the desert dervish was devouring her, digesting her even now almost, as it seemed, the Queen squeamish and unable to feel her legs as those corduroy-clad extremities were sucked underneath.
"All my life, you know…I never really lived up to my codename. Made sand more than anything…was turned to glass a couple of times, consistent with that.
"Now, though…the substance that's swallowing you…it's nothing less than the Dust to which you're destined to return."
Then a pause by Miss Qadir, as the Queen whom she sought to quell continued to decline, she plunging further and further into the morass of muck while Sooraya spoke.
"I understand that the stuff from which you were spawned might not made for the most…earthly kind of origin…but return to it you will. Can't get away with blasting everyone in this life, Madelyne."
And as the Queen continued to fall in the midst of all the quickdust…she felt herself begin to undergo another transformation…though it was more a corruption of body than soul this time.
Then Sooraya, calling out once again from the barge.
"People of my own demographic have been demonized for quite a while…so I kind of know what you're enduring, at least in the abstract. I've never had to withstand it in such a literal fashion, however."
All this as Mad felt the very alteration of essence that she foisted upon a hapless mother and father of a particular psionic, many more moons ago than the span of an Infernal summer, as it were. Now the wayward lady realized that it had been perhaps hundreds of years since that assault on the city, since she first assumed the shawl and the girdle and the boots and the medallion, Madelyne knowing that it was even after the end of the Dream's day, and that she was somewhere even more hellish than a heated-up Apple of the Empire State.
Miss Pryor now felt paws in the place of hands, hooves in the stead of feet, horns beginning to burgeon from her brow. In essence, she was morphed into something along the lines of Illyana's Darkchilde, though not quite as flatteringly. What she had brought upon Elaine and John, the parents of Jean, was now pushed upon her in turn. And no Goblin magicks could prevent or cure the morbid metamorphosis at hand.
"Just so you know too," added the vindictive Qadir, as her silt boat began to slip away into a distance of dirt, "It isn't me who's channeling this change upon you. Mephisto and his darling daughter Witchfire—a redhead far more diabolical than you, perhaps even moreso than Satana herself—they're the ones who're delivering this turnabout.
"Not that I'm condemning it, though, in any way."
The elegant Afghan lifted a lithe hand to wave goodbye to the other, woebegone woman in her wake. "I'm tempted to utter the American cliché 'Eat my dust'—or given that I am of such substance, and given that you are drowning in it as of now, I'm itching all the more to just say 'Eat me.' But I'll take the higher road, one which is very much above ground (which is more than I can say for you)…
"So peace be upon Him, and upon you, as well, my Madame Madelyne."
And so Sooraya Qadir sped off, rendering Madelyne Pryor abandoned one last time, the latter deluged in shifting sediment and damning demonization, she headed downwardly toward her erstwhile husband Scott's final challenge in his own gelid personal hell.
The Queen could feel herself falling, trying to vocalize her dismay as she grew colder and colder on the way down. As fate would have it, she would be destined to land mere meters from the man who had made her life as much as she made his.
Hopefully if Cyclops could see through the illusion of what she had become now on the surface, if he could recognize the good that did lie dormant within her to this time beyond The End…the two of them and their son Nathan Christopher would all attain the salvation that no one of them could have in any heaven without the love and the tenderness of the two others. On Madelyne's own end, for them all to prevail here it would require a tranquility to transcend the anger that had eroded her for far too long.
AFTERWORD
This is my second to last X-Men story, and my last Madelyne Pryor one. I have enjoyed writing mutant narratives for two years now, although only some have turned out alright (some were utterly terrible, I know). It's my goal to move on, though, beyond fan fiction within the next year I hope.
With this story just now I honestly was not inspired by the whole new "Inferno" publication, tied in with Secret Wars I think and written by Dennis Hopeless, aka the Most Appropriately Named Person Ever. As some people may know, I've been writing Madelyne stuff sporadically over the years (see my "Land Grafts" and "Dreamings to Diadems" stories from late last year, for example, as well as my "Settlements," "Borealis," and "Amends" stories from two years ago—the last of which was the much larger sibling to this story just now). In fact, the "gelid hell" thing at the end of this story just now refers to the last chapter of the "Amends in the Abyss" story; I wanted this story just now to be its own thing, though, as it focuses on Madelyne instead of Scott.
Really I'm not even going to read the new Inferno from this year, honestly, because 1) I'm trying to quit comics (the way a chronic smoker tries to quit cigarettes) and 2) I don't want to see Hopeless fuck up and violate my tender memories of Inferno the way, for example, a favorite baldy mofo of mine has fucked up the Original Five with All-New X-Men. My heart just couldn't take it; not to sound emo or weak sauce, but whatever. You can lol at me, it's okay; I have a feeling that many see me not so much as a literary luminary as a ludicrous lolcow, but eff it. I'm not going for greatness here anyway; I'm just writing what's on my mind, and if I entertained you, that's what matters. Hopefully I've made some people think a bit more on things, like gender balance, or just characters who have been thrown under the bus and needed some elevation, or other characters who got away with things and needed comeuppance IMO.
I appreciate everyone who has read my stuff over the years, and I'll see you again next month. Beyond June's X-Men story I will write other, nonmutant stories, up to a bit beyond this year and that might be it. I know I have a long way to go, in my own writing voice (curing addictions to alliteration, pretentiousness, and verbosity, to name a few) but again I thank you guys for coming along on my narrative adventures as they have been progressing so far.