A Taste of Hell: Janneke

She crawled on, kicking at the human souls as they grabbed her and climbed over each other. Soon a half dozen humans, squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the tunnel and frothing at the mouth, grabbed her feet and legs, trying to remove her armor. It could not be removed so easily, but that didn't stop them from trying.

"Give us your heart," one of them said.

"Give us your heart!"

"Blood. Flesh. Give it to us!"

She didn't know if this madness was from starvation, or perhaps the group of humans, large as it was, had managed to kill and eat demons before, tainting them. Maybe they were from the Righteous Horde, or had been helped by them? If the council restarted the patrols, perhaps she'd know! But no, she came down here knowing little, because the damn council--

One of them grabbed the tip of her wings, and she screamed as the damned woman ripped several feathers from her. The mad woman screamed with joy as she waved a few of the once white feathers around, before Jann kicked her in the face hard enough she fell back and dropped them. Another human grabbed them before Jann looked away and crawled on. The poor fool didn't know her feathers held no resonance and little essence for him to devour. She had to get out before they buried her.

The amber lines in the tunnel were almost nonexistent. Sharp rocks cut against her armor, stalagmites she had to crawl around, occasionally breaking them against her knees. The humans behind her continued to scream and gargle with desperation, even as they tore themselves apart over the jagged stones. Their fingers found grooves in her greaves and pulled, but all they managed to do was drag themselves along the stones with her.

They didn't care about their torn flesh. They didn't care they were squashing each other until they couldn't breathe. They didn't care that they clawed each other and broke each other's bones as they wrestled for her. They didn't care. And if they managed to swarm her, she didn't know if she'd be able to fight them off, not here where she couldn't so much as stretch her wings.

Lord, forgive her.

She summoned her sword. The flash of gold light in the dark half blinded her, and she squinted into the light as she rolled onto her side and faced the ravenous horde. Slowly, as the horde crawled further up her legs and pulled at her wings, she pointed the sword at them.

The blessed mirror metal erupted. The tunnel disappeared in a flash of gold and white, and Jann forced herself to stare through the blinding light, even as it unleashed its power upon the humans around her legs. Flesh seared. Eyes disintegrated. The human screams, temporarily buried in the roaring power of the smiting blast, rose an octave and into sheer screeching agony as the noise of her attack faded.

What was once a couple dozen men and women squeezing through the tunnel to try and capture her became a writhing mess of limbs and pain. They clutched at their melted eyes, fingers tearing through the burned flesh on their cheeks. The smell filled the tunnel, bringing Janneke to nausea as she forced herself to stare at the pain she'd wrought.

Even in their confused agony, the humans still clawed and grabbed, but they no longer did to her. Blind and broken, they grabbed onto whatever they could, rocks, each other, and screamed as they shook what their blind hands found. She crawled away, but continued to stare behind her as the horde screamed after her, lost in their fury and in the pain of losing their eyes and skin.

"God must be undone!" one of them screamed.

"Undo God!"

"All angels must die!"

For all their pain and madness and charred lips, they continued to speak. Once they realized what had happened, they crawled after her, letting each other go, but their speed was reduced to almost nothing, blind as they were. They couldn't go two feet without entangling each other. They were doomed.

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Eventually the tunnel opened up, and she was free to stand up again. The humans hadn't been able to keep up with her, blind and burned as they were. She could still hear their screams, and she wasn't sure how much of that was from the echoes.

They wanted to kill her. To eat her. She'd expected fury and desperation; all denizens of Hell reacted with pure desperation when an angel passed by, and fury when they realized they were not to be saved. Jann did not spend much time in Hell when it was more common, for that very reason. Now she almost never came here, and only now because of Yosepha.

After tonight, she wouldn't be returning for some time. She was never leaving the baths again. Perhaps she could spend the next hundred years doing nothing but washing the blood off her and out of her feathers. And how long had it been since she last enjoyed the touch of a human soul in Heaven? After tonight, she knew she'd have a hard time looking at any of them.

She sighed as she flared out her wings, embracing the new space available to her. Slowly, she looked down at her empty hands, and the metal of her gauntlets. Never, in her thousands of years of life, had she ever smote humans. She knew what it would do, but never had she been forced to use it.

Don't think about it. Don't think about the screams. She had more important things to worry about for the moment.

The word of Cain had spread, if it reached Death's Grip. It mattered little what damned souls did with their time in Hell, but it was startling nonetheless. If another Righteous Horde suddenly began, another group following the fairy tales of Cain, it would no longer be an ignorable problem.

Sighing, she took a deep breath, and continued on.

No wonder few demons used this offshoot tunnel, and why those humans used it. Had, used it. It was long and seemed to go nowhere. The humans had likely run into it to escape demons, and continued on and on, only stopping when they stumbled upon a forbidden tree. Remote as it was, the tree had likely held several fruit when the humans found it.

They'd been starving for months.

She squeezed her hand inside the armor glove until her blood pulsed. She was no gabriem. Battle called to her as surely as any mikalim. So why did this bother her so much? Why did she care what the damned suffered? It was their own fault. Was it so hard to go through a life on the surface without wishing ire upon others? Without devolving into...

Yes, it was hard. The gabriem had explained to Jann multiple times over her many years, the sort of trial and hardships some humans on the surface were forced to go through before death. Yes, for some of them, it was hard, victims of circumstance. And knowing that made seeing these damned souls all the harder. How long would they suffer before returning to the Great Tower? Some of those faces she'd seen tonight had numbers as high as 500 carved into their foreheads. How long would their agony last?

She walked through the tunnel, and once it opened into a massive cave, she took a deep breath, and flew through it instead. Thick amber veins lit the path, and she at last let herself relax. Not so relaxed she dismissed her batlam rune, but relaxed enough she let herself find a nice half flying, half gliding pace.

It took time to get through the tunnel, a long time. While amber veins and the occasional burning bush lit her path, there was little else in the lengthy tunnel. Which left her, alone, with her thoughts. Her, alone, with the alien hunger Glor's heart had summoned. Tiny, inkling thoughts crept up through her, whispering dark temptations and drawing darker images. Her atop a mound of corpses, wings radiant, body naked, covered in blood as she raped and killed and devoured any and all she wished.

Nausea followed soon after, and she forced the thoughts away as best she could. Think of Heaven. Think of its soothing waters. Think of the warm embrace of her fellow angels, and perhaps those of loving, adoring humans, of the souls worthy of Heaven. Think of her bed. Think of the gorgeous, endless clouds of Heaven that lay between the Heavenly Islands. Think of her perch in the golden towers of Ravid. Think of quiet, blissful nights and the stars above.

The tunnel grew larger, and soon other tunnels connected to it. Now was no longer the time for a quiet, gentle flight, but speed. She flapped her wings hard, and bits of gold glittered over them as she poured the strength of her grace into them, lighting the cave as if she were a shining beacon. Which meant every nearby demon would see her coming. But with the element of surprise, hopefully she'd fly past them.

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A day later, wings aching, body sore, limbs trembling with exhaustion, she reached the tunnel exit. At some point it'd stopped being a tunnel and became a deep pit of sorts, something for her to fly up; harder, fighting gravity. And whenever she had to pass a group of demons, she did so quickly.

She half expected to find Romakus at the exit, pointing and laugh. But he wasn't. Instead she found nothing more than a cave entrance, sloped and pointed upward. The burning skies of Hell awaited her, and she soared up to meet them. False Gate was several days of hard flying away, but high up, she could fly quickly without issue, riding the currents.

And most of all, no demons could reach her, high in the sky. Not even those accursed imps and grems.

She stared down at the mountains below, the jagged, cruel mountains of Death's Grip. Its spire sat many miles away, but still visible, so tall it scraped the sky. And tall as it was, it still didn't compare to the mountains of the territory. Some of them were truly massive, and she'd exited from the tip of one of them. It'd been a long flight.

She took off toward False Gate and the vortex, letting the hot winds beneath lift her higher and higher, until Hell was a distant place below. Free. She was free. No one could stop her now. The sky, even Hell's sky, was the domain of angels.

Below her, the land rolled by. The mountains of the enormous land of Hell slipped past her, and soon she could see the deep basin and endless canyons of the Grave Valley. Beyond them, the Red Pits, a vast plane of crimson. And beyond them, False Gate. The many cathedrals of rock and metal that dotted its roving lands of stone and lava were specs in the distance. But the vortex, the great swirling maelstrom of energy, lightning and fire and death, it was visible from any corner of Hell.

From up here, she could also see the center of the vast land. She stared at it, at the dark clouds that hovered over it, and the pure darkness that buried it where no amber grew, where no bushes caught flame. The Forgotten Place. She shivered just looking at it, and tore her eyes away from the black depths of the center of Hell, before setting her eyes back to the vortex over False Gate.

Back to Heaven, and to have a stern word with Yosepha about her vulgar, frustratingly intriguing boyfriend.