The Pleasures of Hell 01.007

The images vanished, Caera's face cutting through the blurring fog until all that remained was the cave, its amber veins, and her. But the memories remained.

"I... I saw..." Blackness yanked him down, and buried him in its grip.

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~~Mia~~

The rest of the hike to the spire was uneventful, kinda. Nothing attacked them, and none of them expected anyone to, either. In the valley, they were 'safe', as Adron put it, complete with air quotes. No reason for them to look behind them, or maintain a perfect formation, but that also meant they were more free to glare back at Mia and give her the stink eye.

They didn't trust her. They hadn't ever trusted her, but now they didn't trust her in that 'this little girl is dangerous' kinda way, which was a very strange feeling. She'd never had anyone look at her like she was dangerous. Quite the opposite, in fact. Being barely five feet tall had meant a life of people thinking she was completely harmless; one of the reasons she'd gotten into resistance training. Alas, a little muscle on her thighs and curve on her butt hadn't really helped make people fear her on Earth's surface, and certainly wasn't helping her in Hell. But now she was, apparently, not exactly human, and had an aura they all feared quite a bit.

At least they stopped checking to see if she tried to run. The valley was wide and mostly flat, making any attempt to run and hide pointless. Well, maybe she could hide, but considering the sights before her, that wasn't happening.

She came closer to Hannah and Adron, and closer, until she almost touched their sides with her shoulders. Eyes wide until the hot air stung, she gulped hard, and slowly stepped around Adron to put him between her and one of the big spikes sticking up out of the ground. A big, black spike, more of that black stone she'd heard the meera metal was made of. And skewered on it, was a person, a human. The spike was thin enough that whoever killed the man had made sure the spike had gone up between the legs... and out the mouth.

She covered her mouth and forced her eyes in another direction. Fucking christ, was Vlad the Impaler still alive down here?

It didn't get any better as they got closer to the spire. More spikes, many with a corpse on them, and many of the bodies weren't human. Dead tigers, dead vrats like Adron, a dead gargoyle, a dead satyr, and a few dead big brute boys, too. How the hell did someone get one of those brutes onto a spike that stuck up twelve feet in the air? They were huge! But someone had, or someones, and the dead demons had spikes going straight up through their whole body. Most of the corpses were skeletons, but plenty were new.

"What... What happened?" she asked.

"Zel doesn't tolerate dissidence," Adron said, gesturing to a nearby spike with his tail. "Don't step out of line and you won't wind up on one of these spikes. Try and dodge the call of the horde, though, and she'll do worse than sink you on a spike."

Mia should have seen this coming. Of course a ruler of Hell would be more than capable of enforcing their rule, and plenty happy to be brutal about it. She didn't bother asking if these humans and demons had been alive when put on the spikes. She knew.

There was more than spikes, too. Hell had a motif, and it -- or she -- stuck to it like a goth teenager utterly convinced they had to wear their new sense of fashion with religious devotion. The mountains in the distance were dotted with burning bushes, with more than a few of them sticking up from some rocky areas in the valley. It was the black skulls that gave her pause though, hundreds, maybe a few thousand of them, sticking up out of the ground on black poles five feet tall. The skulls were demon skulls, complete with big fangs and big defined jaws, but they didn't exactly fit any of the demons Mia had seen so far. Either way, they were spread out perfectly and evenly, in a circular shape around the spire. And according to Adron, they hadn't been carved or crafted. They'd grown.

A few amber veins ran along the ground, but rarely, as if they preferred the jagged mountains to flat ground. Except for one particular spot where a few dozen of them converged, and disappeared into a crack in the ground.

"What's that?" Mia asked, pointing to the spot.

Adron smiled down at her and walked toward the crack. Stopping shy of it, he gestured.

"Don't fall."

Oh, don't fall, no problem. Not like she was in Hell and any misstep could easily spell her instant death.

She approached, stopped, squinted up at the smiling demon, grabbed his tail, and came closer. Of course he just laughed, but he also didn't yank his tail free as she approached the big crack in the dark stone.

It was only a couple feet wide, but it also went a few hundred feet along the ground, begging for someone to forget it existed, fall in, and die. And they would die. The heat pouring up from the crack was immense, and she could only stick her head out for a second before she had to yank it back. Hell's hot breezes bothered her eyes sometimes, but the waves of heat coming up from deep below were far worse. That, was lava, bright and flowing deep in the earth. Not Earth. Hell.

"Lava. This is the stuff inside the amber veins?"

"Yeap."

"You said it was Hell's blood?"

"We call it lava," Adron said, "but some demons call it liquid hellfire. And a few call it the blood of Hell." Shrugging, he gently pulled back on his tail, drawing Mia away from the crack. He'd been close enough there'd been no danger of her falling, but she held onto the tail regardless.

"Come," Diogo said, and he continued on. How nice of him to give her a whole five seconds to check something out.

Everyone fell back into the group, and they walked between the skull brazier poles toward the spire. Spire was a weird word for it, fitting and not. It was a tower, and it had a pointed top, but it was more like... like... there wasn't a word for it. A growth? Whatever the thing was, it had slabs of black stone at the base, but it also had entire sections of... flesh, covering chunks of the black. Almost as if one of the much smaller black spikes surrounding Mia had grown a million times too big, and was covered in fleshy alien growth. Flesh, and bone. White sections reached up high across it, looking way too much like the side of a bone being exposed from underneath the muscles that coated it. And every so often, a giant balcony circled the entire tower, something made of more black stone, and black metal too, but with white claws sticking off the edges, claws that must have been bigger than her entire body.

"Is that... flesh?" she asked. Now that the tower was only a kilometer away, she could see the red and white stuff weren't more rock, but actual bone and muscle. It wasn't a trick of the eyes. With each step they came closer, it only got worse. The flesh chunks on the outside didn't hold still, but pulsed every so often, like a heartbeat. Like... Hell's heartbeat?

Screeching grabbed her eyes, and she froze as a few hundred pairs of wings took to the air. The lowest of the circling metal balconies erupted in movement, and more than Mia stared up as wings blocked out the sky of fire. Demons were everywhere. Imps and grems jumped from the spire and glided overhead, spiraling over Mia and the group, many cackling, many chirping and clicking, all of them making noise. A few glided over to the crack in the stone ground, grabbed the hot air under their wings, and went higher. Many landed and perched on a spiked corpse, took a bite, and hopped away, scampering on the ground. Hundreds of them waited, and watched Diogo. They recognized him.

The base of the huge spire had cave-like entrances, covered in white spikes she had to assume were bone, with entrances lit by dangling skull braziers hanging from chains covered in more spikes. Too far to see into the entrances, but demons came and went by the dozens, big ones and small ones, some she recognized some she didn't. More than a few times bat-like demons, skinny women about six feet tall with no arms, came wandering out of the spire, turned around, and climbed up the spire's side with their wing claws. Some hung upside down from the balcony overhead. One demon came out, a beast of a man that walked on all-fours despite probably being able to walk upright, and he looked their way. Like the satyr demons, he didn't have eyes, but instead had big horns that connected to the black bone covering where eyes would normally be. But the horns came out to the side, and his snout was long and came to a point. A shark? With horns?

Why wasn't anyone greeting them? Or rolling out the red carpet for Diogo, or doing anything to show they knew he was coming? Oh, right, because they didn't. Hell didn't have phones. Their arrival was a surprise, and plenty of demons stopped what they were doing to watch, probably trying to figure out why they'd come.

Mia did her best to keep her aura under control. Suppressing the tingling vibration in her was easy for the moment, considering the last thing on her mind right now was sex. The giant valley full of corpses on spikes, wandering and staring demons, and the enormous spire before her that looked like it might have come out of Hellraiser with a bloody makeover? All she felt was icy, stinging chills in her spine.

Closer and closer, until the spire stood towering over them. It was way too big. It had to be bigger than any skyscraper on Earth, but not wide enough to deal with a hard breeze. Not that it wasn't wide, but not wide enough for the insane height. But as they closed in on the final distance, she looked down at where the bone, flesh, and black stone of the spire's base sat on the ground. It didn't sit on the ground. It grew up from the ground.

And then they were inside. And Hell really showed herself.

Inside the spire, the world changed. Death's Grip was a huge province hundreds of kilometers wide as far as she could tell, and it was all cliffs, deadly jagged mountains and canyons, with ravines filled with screaming dying remnants, and skull braziers, amber veins, and burning bushes keeping the province lit, not to mention the burning sky. But in the spire, it was a world of flesh, and bone, and sharp metal.

The enormous room, bigger than a hockey stadium -- maybe as big as a football stadium? -- was like the inverse of the outside of the tower, with a balcony along the inside, and a giant hole in the center, going both up, and down. The balconies on the spire's outside were spread out vertically, maybe a hundred meters between each, but on the inside, it looked like there were ten times as many inner balconies circling the big hole in the center. She and the group approached the inner edge of the balcony they stood on, it was clear there were far more inner balconies above her, hundreds... and far more below.

She sucked in a hard breath as she peeked over the edge of the balcony, and stared down into the pit. Down, and down, and down. If there was a bottom, she couldn't see it.

Adron pulled her back. "Careful."

"Oh... right." For just a second, fear of falling to her death had been replaced with awe. There were no railings. Each balcony, a flat platform circling around the giant hole in the middle of the tower, had short black spikes that came up at the edge, hardly protection from falling.

From the edges of the balconies, imps and grems hopped and glided up and down the balconies to different floors, and sometimes bigger demons did, too. Cages dangled by chains from the balcony edges, with demons often using them as jumping points or landing points as they went up and down. It was like the inside of Diogo's cave, except a thousand times worse. Inside the cages were one, two, sometimes six remnants, stacked against each other and clawing out against the air as they groaned. A few of them did more than groan. They called for help, with words, normal sounding words. Not all remnants? Humans locked into the cages maybe, left to die slowly?

The walls were a different story. Not metal, and the black stone was mostly covered by huge slabs of red that, yes, was actually pulsating muscle. She drifted toward the wall, and Diogo and the group let her, apparently distracted with their own chatter while Mia approached the tall surface of flesh and bone. White bone spikes jutted from the flesh, and around where the metal floor connected to the wall. Several remnants squirmed, bodies half merged into the flesh wall, and more than a few with a spike puncturing through their abdomens, but they weren't dying, yet. They weren't going anywhere.

The occasional amber vein cut along the flesh and white bone, but they were rare. The wall of flesh almost looked like it was trying to hide the amber, instead preferring to show flesh, and in certain places, blood. The flesh wasn't perfect. It was cut and bleeding in certain places, or torn by bone spikes or the metal floor, or by a big metal hook that had a heartless demon corpse skewered on it.

"Creature," Diogo said.

Mia snapped around. Diogo was looking at her, Adron too, and everyone, and more. A dozen demons had shown up, some naked, some wearing armor and skulls, some wearing brown leather cloaks, some wearing some sort of white, partly see-through silk. More demons showed up, and more, and they all stared at her.

"Me?" Of course her.

"Follow." He gestured toward the path ahead of him, and he walked.

No point in arguing, and his heavy voice punched through her stupor like a slap. She jogged for a second, caught up, and walked behind the juggernaut brute as he moved toward what looked like a stairway in the flesh wall. A peek behind her solidified her worry. The others weren't coming, not even Adron.

Adron winked at her though, and waved at her, subtly with his claws but a wave everyone noticed anyway. He didn't think she was going up those stairs to die? Better than nothing.

The stairs weren't metal, or black stone. She'd figured they would be, but nope, she walked on big wide horizontal slabs of bone. Not fake bone, like something carved to look like it. It was bone. Her feet recognized the texture, and if she got down and licked it, it'd probably feel like the t-bone of a steak. Surprisingly pleasant to walk on, with a gripping texture that stopped her from slipping while also being much easier to walk on than metal or rocks. But, still, bone, ugh.

The stairway turned in a smooth half circle, connecting to the metal balcony above, where Diogo took another left and into another stairway. And then again on the next floor, and again. Sometimes she had to push aside dangling metal chains, and the skulls attached to them. Sometimes she had to fight her way past a remnant Diogo hadn't bothered killing for her. Sometimes a demon blocked the stairs by chance, and quickly stepped aside for Diogo, only to stare at her in confusion. And sometimes, a drop of blood fell onto the path, forcing her to look up at where the mix of flesh and stone didn't always play nice with the metal spikes.

Each time they reached the next floor, she looked across the metal balcony circling the big hole in the middle of the tower. There were rooms attached to the sides, with archway tunnels accepting demons into them. Sometimes she heard screaming coming from them. Sometimes moaning. Sometimes both.

Up and up and up. Diogo took his time, probably in no hurry to tire himself out scaling a colossal building like this. Mia's legs burned, though. Sweat dripped down her naked body, and she breathed hard. The smell of blood, either from the tower or from hungry demons, disappeared under her exhaustion. Walking kilometers upon kilometers for four days? Hard but doable. Scaling a skyscraper's worth of stairs? Hell's ultimate torture, reserved for only the most horrible, cruel humans.

Thankfully they didn't scale the whole thing. Maybe about halfway up, and Mia absolutely convinced her afterlife body was going to disintegrate from exhaustion and heat overload, they stopped. And it was obvious why. On the other side of the circling balcony, across the pit, was a giant skull. Black metal, with fire burning in its eyes, and mouth open. The skull was tilted and its mouth open wide, clearing maybe fifteen feet of height, meaning Diogo had no trouble stepping through it once they finally got to it.

She followed through, stepping over the sharp teeth poking up from the floor where the skull's jaw would have been if the balcony hadn't been there.

The spire's throne room made the big cave Diogo had look like a child's papier-mâché cosplay version. A large throne sat in the back of the huge room of metal and stone, something made of bone. It was an arrangement of bones made to fit the shape of a big, fancy throne, and even weirder, was some of the bones could have only fit that throne. The fuck sort of creature would have bones like that? No creature, that's what kind. They were throne bones.

The walls were mostly stone, with more amber veins Mia had oddly found herself missing. The floor was stone, with chunks of flat metal floor underneath, and fucking titanic rib bones poking up just enough she had to step over them. Cages with remnants inside dangled from the high ceiling. Black metal skull braziers hung from the cages. On the walls, more spikes jutted out, and a few humans and demons were skewered on them, in the process of dying... slowly. Oh god oh god oh god.

Diogo walked forward, casually stepping over the giant bones, past the big stone tables with blood and gore all over them, past the chairs made of bone complete with chair-specific bones, and past the huge pool off to one side that was absolutely blood. Thick blood, not like the Adam's Blood river. Heavy crimson blood that flowed down from the mouth of a giant white skull in the ceiling.

"Diogo," the demon woman on the throne said.

"Zelandariel," Diogo said, and he nodded. Deep nod. Fuck, that was a bow. For some reason, seeing the stoic, juggernaut brute bowing to someone, was scarier than the spire and all the horrors Mia had seen so far.

Zel stood up, and stepped down the shallow metal stairs down onto the stones in front of Diogo, and Mia slipped a few inches more behind the brute.

Zel was taller than him. Maybe a foot taller. She stood on black hooves, and while she had no tail or wings, she had four arms, each ending in an assortment of very large black claws. White silk draped over her, a few scarves of it that hung loosely and did a poor job of hiding her thin, fit physique, moderate breasts, and slab of abs. Her face was slim, sharp, and she had no nose. Four enormous black horns pulled up and away from her forehead, curling back over her skull like a strange, glorious, alien crown. From underneath her horns, long black hair tendrils dangled from her skull and reached past her ass, and considering how tall she was, that was damn long.

She was alien and beautiful and odd and majestic. And terrifying, especially with the strange, lightly glowing amber horn sticking straight up from her forehead. And she'd pierced the thick hair tendrils with bones, tiny ones. Finger bones? Human finger bones? Mia took a step back and--

"You," Zel said, red and black demon eyes snapping to her, "are... not marked?" Slowly, the beautiful alien demon queen licked her lips.

Shit.