The Pleasures of Hell 01.007

Deeper and deeper into the mountain, it got warm. Caera didn't sweat, but David had to wipe a drop from his eyes. Heat sucked. Humans hid in this insanity?

Apparently they did, and more than a just a couple. Five humans sat in a larger section of the deep cave, three men, two women, and they wore bits of armor, leather cloaks, and one of them even had a demon skull dangling from their hip. They had weapons, too. One big black sword, and one axe. Ugh, why not a spear? A spear would be great. The most underrated, most influential and useful melee weapon in all history. Human history, anyway.

The only reason the humans couldn't see Dave and Caera, was their rapt attention on the scratch marks on the wall in the back of the room, above some glowing amber veins. No, wait, not veins. Glowing runes. Plus, Caera refused to let even the smallest sliver of herself stick out from around the rocks on the tunnel, save for a single spot where the nearby amber veins weren't shining very well. Hell loved shadows, and the tunnels were even worse for it, with the amber casting sharp shadows perfect for hungry demons to hide in. Caera's horns didn't stick very high above her head, either. They were for ramming and stabbing, not posturing.

She did exactly that. Without making a sound, no roar to announce her presence, not even a grunt of exertion, she dashed around the rock into view, and threw herself at the group. They'd gotten into a more involved conversation about the scratch marks, and Caera had picked the exact moment they'd all looked to the wall, exposing their backs for a whole half second. She was too good at this.

The humans had just enough time to gasp before the tregeera ran into one, her head tilted down slightly so they were immediately skewered on her horns. And like a bull, she threw her head up, and tossed the human aside like they weighed nothing. The other humans jumped to their feet, some picking up rocks like David's, two others picking up the sword and axe.

Caera went for the two with the rocks first. One tried to block her swipe, but a rock only managed to block the tiger's big, clawed hand once, while the other hand got the woman straight in the chest. The claws went deep, above the little bit of armor the woman had, directly into the clavicle and throat. David didn't watch what happened to her throat after.

The two with the meera weapons were slow. The man with the rock wasn't, and he brought down the big thing like a mallet toward Caera while his companion died. Caera saw it coming, and had already been ducking to the side, half standing half pouncing forward with the power of her hind legs. Gravity didn't mean shit to Caera. Her massive weight hit the wall, hands first, then feet, and she bounced off the dark stone onto the man who'd missed her.

David came closer.

The man underneath Caera screamed, but she was already getting back up onto her hind feet as she slashed one hand to the side, and the man's throat disappeared in a red splatter. The first man she'd run-through with her horns crawled away, but they didn't get far, blood pouring out of their midsection over the stone. Hell was all too happy to suck the blood up into the mountain, and her dark stone turned a shade redder.

The human with the axe came at Caera, the big blade already swinging through the air from above, like he was going to chop wood with it. Caera was too fast. Even with her huge cat-like body, she managed to throw her weight to the side, and counter-pounce opposite of the axe, straight at the man. But the axe came down fast, and David braced himself for demon brains.

The huge black blade hit one of her horns, half bouncing the axe back up, half pushing Caera down to the ground. But she already had her hands underneath her again and caught her weight. She'd blocked the axe with her horn on purpose. Snarling, she pushed herself back up seamlessly, a pouncing motion she used to drive her weight onto the axe-wielder, and tear into him.

Except, Caera missed. Partly. Her body landed on the axe user, and she got her claws into him, but the motion threw her weight forward and she half rolled, sending the man's blood and flesh around and onto the ceiling. The axe went flying, and the man wielding it half screamed, half gargled on blood, as Caera's claws came out of him at an odd angle, mostly straight out. Instead of dying almost instantly, the man was left a choking mess, chest torn up, but throat mostly intact. And Caera's half roll meant she hit her side against a giant boulder sitting near one of the other connecting tunnels, hard enough the ding of her armor against the rock echoed through the cave.

David came closer, and refused to look at the dying man.

The woman with the sword came at Caera, screaming. It was a mad scream, a crazy person's scream, the sort of scream you made when you were rabid and beyond reason. For a split moment, it seemed like the woman about to slash at Caera wasn't a person at all. It was some... thing, some entity wearing a cloak and armor like David, some monster that was going to kill his friend and eat her heart. And then Jes and Dao would starve, and die, and...

David brought down the rock on the back of the woman's head. Hard. He knew he had to put every bit of weight he had into it, light as he was, and his feet came up off the ground half an inch with the impact of stone against the woman's skull. Bone broke, and the big rock went a lot deeper than he expected it to. Than he wanted it to. There was softness at the end, before the woman's body fell, a texture he felt through the big stone he'd wished to God he hadn't felt.

"David!" Caera's voice.

A shadow came up from behind one of the rocks, and David spun, gore-smeared rock still in his hands. No thought to it, just a reflex. He'd hit Mia a few times with a book, or the back of a hand, just accidental stuff when spinning around because she'd randomly and accidentally surprised him. This was like that, plus adrenaline, plus fight-or-flight, plus blood pumping in his ears telling him to hunt and kill. Aura? No. Maybe. His aura? Something angry and alive in him told him to attack, and he did.

And he smashed in the face of another person, an older man, someone maybe in their seventies. They were emaciated, and they'd jumped at David with only a small rock in their hand. Light. They crumpled like paper, spun, fell, and their empty eyes stared ahead.

355 changed to 354.

"Good reflexes," Caera said. "Fuck me, my head is throbbing. Blocking that axe was dumb. I'm seeing double again, and--David? David, you okay?"

He stared down at the old man with half his face caved in, at the woman missing half of her skull, and at the other bodies and the blood pouring out of them. The one Caera had failed to kill fast twitched and writhed, and his bloodshot eyes glared up at them, but he'd be dead in moments.

David gulped down the huge rock in his throat, looked at the much smaller rock in his hands, and the gore on it. Nausea hit him, and he dropped the weapon.

"Fucking... christ, I'm going to be sick."

Caera tilted her head as she prowled over to him, sat in front of him, and nudged his side with a hand.

"Why?"

"Why?" He stared at the tregeera, and then back down at the old man he'd killed. "I killed..." The words were meaningless, especially to a denizen of Hell. This was a normal thing for her.

Caera sighed and shook her head, short black tendril hair bouncing around lightly between her horns. Which of course instantly made her groan and clutch her head with her bloody hand.

"Fuck me," she said. "I need to lie down. Let's get back to the others." And with all the casualness of a farmer taking cows to the slaughter, she turned around, and got to work on the bodies.

"I..." He clenched his fists and looked away. He knew this would happen, that he'd have to kill other humans. And he knew it'd suck, too. But something in his guts told him what he did was fucked up, wrong, and he should do everything in his power to fix the mistake. Every god damn fucking fiber in his whole body told him what he just did was inhuman.

So much for intellectualizing. Sighing and swallowing down the nausea, he forced his eyes back to the symbols on the wall. Focus on something else. Ignore what just happened. He could have a mental breakdown when Dao and Jes and Caera were fed and healing.

"Did you want to read these?" he asked, gesturing to the symbols on the walls. Hundreds of scratch marks, runes, and some glowing amber runes centered on the big back wall of the alcove.

"I glanced at them," she said, between the crunching sound of a breaking sternum. "Pretty old stuff. No wonder they were trying to read them. Fucking Cainites convinced they can find something about Cain in them."

"They can read them? They--" Oh. He could read them, too. "Thee... yonder..." Oh shit it got worse. "Georn... seofen? The fuck is--oh I get it. This is old English. Like, really old English."

"That's how English-speaking humans read it. You see it as an old version of your language. It's Estian, though, a much, much older version than old English. By tens of thousands of years, probably."

"Everyone speaking Estian has got to be the most... I don't know, weird thing about Hell. And... Heaven, now that I think about it. The angels all spoke to me in English, but were they speaking Estian?"

"Probably." More crunch crunch, and a few kasplat noises. He did not look.

"You can read this old Estian stuff?"

"Barely. I worked at it for decades." She lifted her head long enough to glance his way. "The Estian runes are talking about three spire rulers who got in a fight at some point. Probably during the spires war. Nothing important."

He stroked his chin. Ah, yes, quite, the spires war, mhmm mhmm.

More crunching noises. He twisted a little to put his back to the gory mess.

"We got lucky," Caera said. "Just a small group. They'd probably camped here for a few weeks now, deciphering." She chuckled softly. "I bet the morons were trying to decipher the ancient runes, too."

"Ancient runes?" He looked her way. Oh god fucking damn it, why did he look her way? Her big teeth dripped with blood, and he saw her throat just long enough to see the small bulge go down its length. A fed tiger was a happy tiger, and it meant she'd be able to keep him alive all the better, but he was happier not thinking about her big smile and many, sharp, big teeth ripping into human flesh.

You're in Hell, David. Get over it.

"The amber runes, in the middle of the wall there, those are ancient ones. Not all the amber vein runes are from the ancient language, but all ancient language is written with amber veins. Tapping into the amber veins to write runes is something no one's done in thousands and thousands of years."

He nodded, smiling as he listened. She was nerding-out over what she liked. If he wanted, she'd go on and on about the subtle differences between the words at different points in history, probably. He knew the feeling, not for this specific topic, but he knew all too well what it was like to rant at someone about something he liked.

"So ancient is... another language?"

"Far as I can tell, yes."

"Does it have a name?"

"No, everyone calls it the ancient language."

He nodded, and ran his eyes down the normal, non-glowing runes. They were big things with hard edges that ended in sharp points, not exactly a language full of nuance and detail, and how his brain managed to turn them into English letters and words, and very old English letters and words, he didn't know. Someone had carved them into the stone using a chisel or something, and they hadn't done a good job. It wasn't some sort of epic retelling by some powerful wise demon, sharing knowledge for a new generation of demons. It was done probably by a small group of demons hiding out in the cave, like some small tribe; Death's Grip was all too similar to some ancient human civilizations, areas filled with small tribes of 'barbarians' that weren't always too kind to each other.

The amber runes between the scratched-in runes, on the other hand, were a different matter entirely. It flowed, beautiful symbols that lined up with each other in a dance, and many of the symbols looked like the one burned onto Caera's shoulder, flowing lines ending in sharp points. Did it read left to right, right to lead, up to down? No idea, but it was obvious it'd been there on the wall long, long before the other symbols. Now that he had a second to look around, he could see the curvature of the cave walls, the three tunnels connecting with the room, all of it was either directly or indirectly pointing at the glowing symbols.

This wasn't some random cave in a tunnel network. This was a room you came to to read the runes. Were the runes placed here because of that, or were the tunnels made because of the runes? Hell was alive apparently, so--

It clicked, like a light switch in his brain. Recognition. He blinked. A lot. Slowly, he stepped over the closest body, and came up to the glowing amber runes.

"David?"

He stared, lungs frozen. His hand reached out and touched the lines of the glowing veins. Amber veins were always warm, sometimes even too hot to touch, and these were no different. Like Caera said, runes made with amber veins, a lost art.

"These are... ancient runes?" he asked.

"Yes. I said that already. What's wrong with you?"

"You've... seen these runes before? In this specific cave, I mean?"

"Pretty sure, yes. Years ago, but I remember finding these. They're not nearly as well hidden as others. Why?"

He stared at the runes, the alien language, and ran a finger along one of their edges.

"Lucifer... and... Belial... lay scars... upon the stone... deep, and tall, choking life from... all within." Quiet thumps filled his hearing. His heartbeat again. "Death's Grip."

He expected Caera to say something, maybe scream with excitement, or laugh at him and say he was joking. But, when he looked back at her, she just sat there, staring at him, mouth half open with a couple drops of blood falling from her lips.

"... what?" she asked, red and black eyes wider than he'd ever seen.

"That's what... the other runes say, these glowing ones." He looked back at them, tilting his head to the side. Readable. Why were they readable? He looked around the room at the other runes that'd been carved by a chisel or something, and how rough they were, with their hard edges. Chicken scratches his brain turned into English. It was like the afterlife was some sort of reverse Tower of Babel, forcing him to understand something he shouldn't have been able to.

But the other runes, the ancient language written in amber, it was different. The strange symbols flowed into his brain, and became... became. English didn't come into it, the symbols just were, a language he didn't know but knew. Like, waking up one day and being completely fluent in a second language, able to think in its terms, its shapes, its inflections.

"You can read that?" she asked after a heavy silence, and walked over to him on her hands and feet. "The glowing runes?"

"I, uh... I mean, I uh... can. Easily."

"Easily!?" She stood up, placed a hand against the wall of the cave, and gestured to it with the other as she looked down at him. "It took me decades to learn how to read old Estian. I... don't even know where to begin with the ancient language."

"It's not ancient... I mean, it probably is, but it's not an ancient form of Estian. It's something else."

"How do you know?"

"Because my brain isn't interpreting it as English. It's, just... another language."

She lowered herself back down onto her hands, never taking her eyes off him.

"Another language you speak?"

"Yeah... and not French."

"French? What does that have to do with anything?"

"Canadian joke, don't worry about it." He shook his head, and ran a finger along some of the symbols. "They're... They're in my head. The runes, I mean. They're in there, and they... mean... something, on their own. They're in there, and I can see them, and think them, and they mean... stuff."

"Mean... stuff." Groaning, Caera reached out and grabbed his wrist. Wet warmth coated his skin, and he stared down at the red liquid that now dripped from his palm and fingers. A heart. "Eat."

"I--"

"Assuming you're not lying to me, and far as I can tell you're the last person in Hell who'd lie about anything, you can read the ancient language. That means there's no way I'm letting you die, David, even if I have to force-feed you. Eat. Now."

He winced as he met her eyes. Hard, stern, the sort of eyes he gave Mia when he took away her energy drinks and told her to drink water. She wasn't going to take no for an answer.

He looked down at the hunk of flesh in his hand, and sighed.

"How does it taste?"

"From the betrayers who've eaten them, they say it tastes like a forbidden fruit."

He squinted at her with one eye. "Are you lying to me?"

She rolled her eyes. "They also said it tastes a little stronger. There, satisfied?"

A little stronger. The fruit he'd eaten had tasted like almost-raw meat, and he'd liked it. And if eating another human's heart sent the same satisfying, almost tinglingly pleasant sense of fulfillment through him, he wasn't sure he could take that. This was cannibalism.

Except, not really? This was the afterlife. Different rules. Or maybe he was just telling himself that to make what he was about to do okay? Just like killing those two people?

This is Hell. Get over yourself.

He bit into the heart. He had to bite it, because Caera had given him an entire heart, and it'd take a few big mouthfuls to get the whole thing down. Worse was that it fought him, tried to not tear when he pulled at it, but he bit hard, desperate to get this over with as quickly as possible. Flesh tore, and a chunk of the meat was now between his cheeks.

And it did taste good. It tasted more than good. It tasted great, just as good as the fruit, like a marinated steak with salt and pepper and other sauces and... He frowned down at the heart and the blood it leaked between his fingers, and finished it off quickly. Don't think about it. Don't think about what you did with the rock minutes ago. Get the flesh down.

He did. And hated every minute he enjoyed it. What the fuck.

"That was... too easy," he said.

The tiger chuckled as she stood up on her hind legs, four hearts in her hands, and walked for the exit.

"All betrayers say that. Come on, let's go."

"I'm not a betrayer."

"No, you're definitely not. You're not human, either. No one can read those old runes, David."

"I..."

"Plus, you've got an aura, and it changed during the fight. For a second there, it wasn't the constant horny aura you put out like sex is the only thought in your head. For a moment, I felt... something a whole lot different, right when you hit the woman with the rock."

He did not look back at the corpses, with ripped open chests. Six dead, two of them his kills. One, because he'd caught them unawares. Another, because they were old, and starving. They'd died old, came to Hell with a weak body, and he'd bashed their face in with a rock.

How the fuck was he supposed to 'get over himself' over shit like this? This was--

His vision flashed white, and blurred in a maelstrom of images. Noises, voices, scenes he recognized. A street. A sidewalk. Someone pushing someone else into the traffic. His hands. Her hands?

"Fuck!" He stumbled back. His legs. David's legs, not the woman's. His ass on the stone ground, not a street. But there was a street, and a woman's hands in front of him. And someone who'd just been hit by a car, and had their head splattered on the asphalt.

"David? David, you okay?" Caera was with him in a second, squatting down beside him and using the flat side of her big tail to hold him up. Her hands were a bit busy, holding hearts.