The Pleasures of Hell 01.010

Another tunnel, the inside of a gutted snake again, rib bones all around with only the occasional amber vein, a floor of bone, and remnants absolutely everywhere. There was no avoiding the mess this time. Zel used her four hands and her horns, and effortlessly slaughtered through the dozens of men and women that reached for her. The remnants came out of the floor as much as the walls and ceilings, and Zel crushed them under her hooves.

Adron and Kas played cleanup duty, walking and killing remnants before wiping the gore off the bone path with their tails. Talking was pointless. The remnants, blurs in the darkness, eyes lit up by the few amber veins just enough for Mia to see some of them, numbered in the thousands. How long did they stay down here, clawing at each other and getting nowhere? How long did it take a remnant to starve to death, with nothing but the screams of other remnants to keep them company?

She did her best to ignore the squishy, warm wet stuff under her feet.

It didn't last forever. Eventually the tunnel ended, and Zel stopped. It was almost pitch black, with only Zel's extra horn providing any light this deep in the tunnel, and she made short work of the remnants nearby. They splattered, the black door soaked with crimson, and the red liquid trickled down over the engravings and sculptures in the door. Its surface was a myriad of skulls, surrounding one big skull in the middle that looked beyond strange, beyond reason, without any sort of shape she could understand. It had horns but they came out in weird places. It had eyes but it had several, and not in any orientation that made sense. It had a mouth, but it looked like something you'd find on a lamprey.

Zel's horn glowed, the strange eyes of the two doors skull pulsed once with amber, something clicked, and the demon queen pushed open the doors.

Light flooded them. Mia covered her eyes, groaning until they adjusted, and followed the three demons into the colossal room. A black surface surrounded them, no flesh. Giant chains dangled from the ceiling, just three, and each held an enormous skull brazier of black, twenty feet overhead. The ceiling must have been a hundred feet up, maybe more, all rock, and the room was easily ten times as wide. A small army could have fit down here.

Kas closed the doors. How there was oxygen down here to breathe with all these fires burning, Mia didn't bother thinking about. The silence was deafening, not a single remnant in sight, not a whisper broke through the doors, and all around them was complete stillness.

And before them stood a cathedral.

"What the fuck," Mia said, and regretted it immediately. Her voice echoed, and she didn't like the way it sounded as it warped and distorted.

Zel, impervious to spooky sounds, giggled and walked toward the cathedral.

"Come, unmarked one. We will learn much together, you and I." And the look she gave Mia over her shoulder sealed the deal. If Mia didn't repeat the apparent miracle she'd performed earlier, Zel was going to try out that evisceration torture on her she'd mentioned.

"What kind of place is this?" Mia asked, jogging up to follow behind Zel. Kas and Adron followed behind Mia this time.

"I'm not telling."

"Uh, what?"

After another feminine giggle, Zel stopped before the cathedral, and gestured out to it with all four arms.

"I cannot have you biased, to perhaps lie to me. I have clues as to what we will learn, you and I, but you will remain ignorant." So much for getting a little info before going inside.

Cathedral was maybe the wrong word. Castle? It was a wall of metal, except... no, no it wasn't. In the dark it looked like black metal, but as Mia came closer to the towering door, ice shot up her spine. It was bone. Not bone growing out of the ground, like everywhere else in the spire. The cathedral was made out of bones, charred, and stacked together. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Fucking millions. And unlike the white bones she'd found everywhere else, in their strange shapes that allowed the demons to make furniture, or grew out of walls to create doors, these bones all looked perfectly normal, and human.

The door behind her had been bone, and the door in front of her was made of nothing but skulls.

Mia took a step back and stared up at the wall. There were windows, but no glass, and what she'd thought were metal bars before, she could now see were more bones, stacked vertically and connected at their ends. The cathedral's front didn't reach the cave ceiling, but it came close, and the top raised into a point, topped with circle patterns of carvings she couldn't clearly see from so far. She didn't have to. They were wreaths of human skulls.

Zel's horn glowed, and she pushed against the two huge doors, far bigger than the ones they'd just come through. The bones rubbed against each other, but didn't break or crumble, as if something had cast and molded them in rock. Petrified bone? No chance. But it sounded like rock, maybe some pebbles, and looking down only confirmed. She'd thought she'd been walking on rock, but the ground was nothing but endless black bone, slightly shifting under her weight, and never breaking, not even under Zel's hooves.

Oh god, even the walls were black bone, stacked sideways. Probably the ceiling, too. Oh fucking god.

"What is--"

Zel snapped her glare at Mia, and Mia winced as she froze. Okay, no questions allowed, at all.

The spire ruler stepped into the cathedral, and Mia followed, eyes first staring down at the various shapes and sizes of bones she walked on -- all human -- before she looked up.

It really was a cathedral, sorta. She expected to find a ceiling closer to her head, but the inside of the building was basically hollow, almost like the main chamber of a church. Looking back to the middle of the room, she half expected to find pews with how huge it was, but nope, instead she found pillars, each reaching the ceiling, each made of charred bones stuck together, thick enough she wouldn't have been able to get her arms around them.

There were only a few sources of weak light: pits in the center, like someone had dug holes for campfires, and circled them with skulls. In the pit, a burning bush stood, large, with a steady but spindly flame. Past the fire pit was nothing but more open space, pillars, another fire pit, and finally another wall. The place was big enough to hold thousands of demons if they crammed together hard enough, and the doorway big enough to allow something twice as big as Zel inside.

There was a pulpit near the far wall, something so big even Zel would look dwarfed behind it. Even so far away, it was obviously made of more bones, an imperfect shape made of skulls and rib cages, and as Zel and Mia approached, the crisscross of bones that made up its top came into view. She was wrong about the fire pits being the only source of light. An amber light glowed at the top of the pulpit, too high for Mia to see what it was.

Zel stepped up behind the pulpit. It stood on a stage with small stairs, thousands of bones that'd been stacked perfectly and somehow held their shape as Zel's heavy body weighed on each. But even at the top of the stairs behind the pulpit, she had to reach up to touch its surface. Whoever used the pulpit had been almost twice as tall as Zel.

She stepped down from the small stage, a giant book in hand, and grinned down at Mia as she sat on the edge of the stairs. The way Zel was not only comfortable and happy to do things herself, but move around like a normal person and not a pompous queen wearing a corset and crown, made her endearing. That wasn't good. Much better to keep her framed as an evil, conniving bitch who'd rip out Mia's guts the moment she thought Mia's life didn't matter. The truth was somewhere in the middle, but better safe than sorry.

"Come, sit," Zel said, gesturing to the small stairway that surrounded the stage.

Mia squinted at her, but Zel's smile remained. The demon held the giant book on her lap with two hands, while two other hands idly plucked at her necklace and her nipple chain with her black claws. She was excited, fidgeting, and didn't want Mia to notice. Well, Mia did notice, because she'd been halfway through Psych 201 before she died. She was great at reading people! Okay, that was a lie, but she was getting better at it.

After a hopefully unnoticeable gulp, she stood beside Zel on the stairs.

"That is a scary looking book," Mia said, gesturing to the cover. "Pretty sure I've seen something like this in Evil Dead."

The book cover wasn't made of skin, but more of the black bone everything else was made of. Someone had somehow merged the bones horizontally, hundreds of small bones, probably from fingers. Subtle amber glow came from between them, from the pages underneath. A single skull decorated the cover, almost like emerging from black water. The amber light underneath it came up through the empty eyes, nose, and between the jaw.

"You... sure you want to open that?"

Zel chuckled and looked up at Mia; her sitting down meant Mia, standing beside her, had a few inches on her.

"I have opened it before." She traced some claws down the cover before looking to the door. "Kas, Adron, wait outside, in the tunnel."

Mia snapped her eyes up to the door of the cathedral. Kas and Adron stood there, and without hesitation, they both nodded, closed the cathedral doors, and headed back toward the tunnel. Zel did not move until the she heard the second pair of doors close. Mia was officially alone with the queen of Death's Grip, and what might as well have been a book of evil spells and summoning rituals in her hands. If Mia couldn't do what Zel was hoping she could, there'd be hell to pay.

Slowly, Zel opened the book. The silent room turned into a black hole. Something sucked the life out of it, and the light, too. Mia forced herself to breathe, tore her eyes away from the runes written on the pages, and looked back out to the fire pits with the burning bushes inside them. Still there, still burning, still quietly crackling. Just a figment of her active imagination.

"Every page in this book is written in the ancient language," Zel said, and she traced a claw down the amber runes, still plucking at her bracelets, necklaces, and nipple chains. Excited, or nervous? Maybe even a little scared?

The pages were black, too, and from the way Zel's claws dragged over them, making quiet scraping sounds, they were made of stone. Someone had managed to capture the amber veins inside slivers of rock not even a millimeter thick. Holy shit.

Mia's eyes locked onto the runes under Zel's claws. They were large, only enough for a few on the first page, and they stood up and begged to be read.

"Death's Grip. Lucifer. Belial," Mia whispered.

Zel sighed with bliss, and turned the page.

Whoever wrote the runes was a professional calligrapher. The glowing lines flowed across the page, a bit smaller than the first page, but still only half a dozen runes.

"You... want me to read all this?"

"Perhaps. That will depend on what we find. Go on."

After a long, heavy breath, Mia looked down at the colossal pages, and began.

"This child of mine, Belial, they shall rule Death's Grip and all within."

Zel's grin dripped with hunger, and she turned to the next page.

"I have wrought my will upon my kin, and have blessed this land with death."

Zel shivered. Mia might as well have whispered dirty talk in her ear, with how she was reacting. The cathedral agreed. The burning bushes exploded with light, the fires grew until they reached far and high, and rumbling crackling sounds buried the silence.

"Oh my," Zel said, looking to the flames. "Continue." With a starving claw, Zel slowly turned the stone page.

Mia took another deep breath and wiped some sweat from her forehead. Reading this was... tiring.

"In these mountains, scarred, burned, and molded, Belial's brood fight amongst themselves."

"As I suspected," Zel said, "these weren't written by Belial. They were written by Lucifer."

"Holy shit." Mia took a small step away. "Should I really read this? Stuff written by Satan himself?"

"Presumptuous to assume one of the archangels was male, a being that sailed the cosmos long before life existed, before men and women. Before bacteria."

That was a good point. Even demons didn't really fit the male female roles considering they weren't the ones reproducing. But Zel was obviously female physically, and Adron, Diogo, and everyone else called Zel 'her'. How did that work?

She was stalling. She didn't want to read from a book Satan wrote. Who would? It might as well have been written in Latin, with her unwittingly summoning the archangel with some mysterious passage. At any moment, orchestral music complete with Gregorian chanting would start playing.

Mia forced herself back in close to Zel's side, and the demon queen turned the page.

"Rise, children of my first. Rise. Obey. I shall rip the fire asunder, and reclaim the Heavens."

The burning bushes brightened again, the fire reached higher, and the roaring sound grew louder. Hot wind cut through the cathedral, and it howled. The runes on the pages brightened too, and Mia winced as the light brought tears to her eyes.

Zel didn't turn the page. With teasing claws, she teased the dark stone, eyes locked onto the glowing runes she couldn't read.

"This place," Zel said, gesturing around with one of her other many hands, "was a place of worship. Demons paid tribute to our most unholy here, and to his nine children."

"Tribute?"

Nodding, Zel ran yet another hand along the floor, and her claws made quiet ting sounds as they clicked over the bones. Oh god, the bones.

"I feel like... like reading this is casting a spell?"

Zel's grin grew big enough to expose her fangs, and she slowly turned the page.

"Come," Mia said, continuing to read for some reason, "children of Hell and Belial, crafted by my hand. Children of the Great Tower. Children of sin. Come, my agents of justice. Prepare for war."

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~~David~

"Alright, I got it this time." Nodding, he pressed his whole body up against the boulder.

It hadn't been easy, getting a rock big enough into a place where they had a bit of a cliff overhang, but they did. One small rock he rested the sword against, and the big boulder was pushed up to it so the hilt and a bit of blade rested underneath it.

The plan was simple. Drop a big rock on the sword from above. The big rock David pressed against would stay over the bottom half of the sword. The lever rock in the middle would apply the pressure needed to snap the blade in half so it wouldn't be so damn heavy.

Or it'd snap the blade off at the hilt and make it useless. But he couldn't use a sword that weighed at least fifty fucking pounds.

Fifty pounds. Divide by two point two. Twenty-one? Twenty-two kilograms? He did the pointless math in his head as he quadruple checked the position of the rock and sword, held up a hand, and aligned them with the giant rock teetering on the edge overhead.

He gave the thumbs up, and backed up around a bit of the cliff path. A nasty engineering accident in his youth had taught him the value of putting a wall between him and any potential explosion or breaking object. Thankfully he, and his guardian at the time hadn't been injured, but Derek's garage did get a big nasty dent in it.

Caera rolled the rock off the edge. Crack, crack, silence, crash.

"Think it worked?" Jes said, chuckling as she stood up. He held out a hand and gently pushed her back behind the rock wall. "Hey, what the--"

Clang. It'd taken a few seconds, but something had come up, and then come down. Much as Hell or the afterlife didn't seem to follow many rules of biology and whatnot, it did seem to at least care about physics a little. Hopefully enough for breaking a sword.

"Things bounce," he said, which of course earned the biggest rolling of the eyes from the gargoyle. He laughed. Dao did too, some chirps and clicks mixing into the lovely sound.

All four of them gathered around the rock, and David let out a long groan as Caera pushed the big boulder off the hilt. Of course it didn't work the way he'd wanted it to. The blade had broken, but way too close to the grip. Dao clicked sadly a few times as she picked up the top half of the blade, sitting ten feet away, while David stared down at the grip in his hands, and the whole three inches of blade sticking out of it. The blade had broken at an angle, so at least the sword had a point, but the blade was shorter than a dagger, and weighed a good fifteen, maybe twenty pounds.

It was now borderline useless. The blade was just too damn short.

Dao clicked softly as she tossed the blade aside, came up to him, and patted his shoulder.

"Don't worry about it," Jes said. "No one's expecting you to fight any demons, unless it's an imp or grem. Or maybe an incubus or succubus; they're not much stronger than humans."

He threw the grip away into a nearby cliff wall, and it clanked and clunked, a bit louder than was probably a good idea. They were supposed to be hiding out.

"I guess," he said as he leaned against one of the boulders they'd moved. "The armor is heavy enough. I used to wear a weighted vest when working out, all the time, but it never got easy."

"You're tiny," Caera said, nodding.

"I'm not... tiny."

"You are so tiny." With a playful grin, Jes came up to him, and used her good wing to hook him around the back and shoulders. Jes was over a foot taller than him, and Caera was over a foot taller than Jes. He was tiny.

"I am not tiny."

Dao clicked a few times, came up, pulled him away from Jes with her good arm, and rubbed a horn against the side of his head. The two girls laughed.

Caera got on all fours in front of him and poked him in the stomach with a claw.

"I don't know how we're going to kill Diogo and stop Tacitus, or get those Cainite bastards, but it doesn't involve you wielding a sword and fighting, David. Just focus on staying alive."

Jes poked at the tiger lady with her tail. "You just want him for your rune reading crap."

"Yes, I do. Learning about the origins of who we are, why Lucifer created us, what happened to them and the Old Ones, you don't care about any of that?"

"Nope." Jes slipped behind David, hugged him, set her chin on his shoulder, and grinned down at Caera. "But I know Dao wants to keep her pet alive. And I know, no matter how much I bitch and complain, Dao won't be happy until she knows he is."

David smiled, but didn't turn around to look at the gargoyle. Instead he gave his smile to Dao, who returned it, leaned in, kissed his cheek, and rubbed her horn on his head some more.

Caera slapped Jes's tail away. "Unless the two of you want to fuck him again, stop getting all over him. He can't control the aura, and I can already feel it growing again."

Jes and Dao laughed. David said nothing. Jes was in a lot better mood now, after having sex again, and he was happy keeping it that way. Maybe she was thinking more clearly now? Maybe sex was how to keep her temper under control? Ha, no way. But whatever it was, she was being a lot nicer than before.

"You girls... You know I'm unbelievably grateful, right? I mean, yes, the sex was amazing and you're all super hot, but... but I'm in Hell, and you three are the luckiest thing that's..." Shit, what would Mia say? "The most amazing..." Nah, she wouldn't say it like that, too corny. "I just... I want to say..."

"Holy shit you suck at this," Jes said, and she kissed his cheek, right where Dao had kissed it. "Just use your aura and seduce us."

"Again?"

Dao clicked a few times, hopped in place once on her good leg, and nodded, big grin on her face.