The Pleasures of Hell 01.019

~~Unknown~~

A girl. Running. Black swamps. Piles of maggots. The fire sky burned a dark color, or was that the air in the swamp, twisting the color? Blood everywhere, turned black in the gross mud. Guts, intestines, organs around her feet. Trenches, filled with bones and flesh.

Whoever this girl was, she was running. But running wasn't good enough. She fell, and turned onto her back.

Someone with enormous white wings, and a blade so perfectly smooth it had a mirror sheen, stabbed her in the heart.

She died.

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~~Day 26~~

~~Mia~~

Mia sat up. The switch in her head flipped back to on, and a glance at the amber veins told her it wasn't quite the morning twilight hours yet. She'd spent a few hours of the night doing guard duty, ready to wake Vinicius if something attacked, then he'd spent a few hours doing the same. Back and forth twice meant she got enough sleep to function at least. And yeah, sitting around for a few hours while Vinicius slept was boring as fuck, but it gave her time to think about stuff and hopefully get over said stuff.

But the third time she woke up, ready to start a brand new day of fresh Hell, she clutched her heart where the angel in the dream had stabbed her.

No, not her. The angel had stabbed someone else. Mia had felt her die. A quick death, almost painless. Almost.

"Vinicius," she said.

Vinicius opened his eyes, head still pointed at the alcove, but his one visible eye pointed directly at her. Eep. Just a little too similar to that scene in The Land Before Time where Cera ran into the unconscious Sharptooth.

Her guardian, at that point in her life, had insisted the old kid's movie would be a good watch. Mia had been five, and still had the mental scars.

"We're alive," she said. "Nothing ate us. No Cainites found us."

Vinicius nodded.

"And, um... I..." She hugged her knees to her chest and put her forehead on her arms. "I had a dream."

Silence, for a few seconds. But when she lifted her head, Vinicius's one visible eye remained pointed at her, and he clicked in his throat once.

"It was a dream. I had a dream. I think? I, or some girl that I was riding, like you kinda sometimes do in dreams, was running away from... from an angel. There was a black swamp, giant piles of maggots, and the air made everything look weird and dark."

"The Black Valley."

"That was the Black Valley?"

He nodded.

"Um, but I've never seen the Black Valley. I don't even really know what it looks like."

"Describe more."

"More." More, and something specific. "I saw... trenches. The girl ran on swampland, stumbling in this shallow dark water, but she also stumbled into trenches. And there were... guts... in the trenches. Guts, bones, everything."

"The Black Valley." Vinicius nodded and slowly brought his colossal body to its feet. The hole in his gut was healed over, but the skin looked red and soft. Hopefully, as long as no one stabbed him there, it'd darken as it healed.

Much as she was still mad at him, she needed him.

"I don't understand. I had a dream? About a place I've never seen?"

"Doubtful."

"Doubtful? What does that mean? That--oh. It wasn't a dream." She got up, adjusted her silk, took a deep breath, covered her faces with her hands, and panicked. "I'm having visions. Oh god I'm having visions! I am literally running out of fingers counting the strange things about me, Vinicius!"

Vinicius rumbled, said nothing, and began their trek once again.

"Asshole."

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She gave up on asking Vinicius about anything. He refused to talk about himself, his past, how he knew the rider or the other armored person, or what his life was like when he was young. She was half convinced he just didn't remember, or cared about those details in the first place. At one point he'd even stopped rumbling or nodding or shaking his head, and straight up ignored her.

The temptation to use the leash on him grew every hour. She'd felt so bad about having him on a leash before, and forcing him to help her. Then he'd tried to hurt her, and a lot of that guilt vanished. Now, she was growing more and more tempted to hurt him just because he was a genuine asshole, on top of being a ruthless murderer and bloodthirsty killer.

But it only took another hour before she was happy to have him around.

Vinicius held up a hand. She froze, stopped breathing, and stared past his arm into the dark tunnel ahead. Winding tunnels were all they'd found, and sometimes there weren't enough amber veins to light the path. On more than a few occasions, she'd had to feel her way around the rocks and stones, which slowed progress to a crawl. Bloodgrip vines were deadly if you didn't give them the respect they deserved, and the threat of them forced her to tiptoe carefully through dark curves.

Apparently, some other people thought the dark tunnels were good hunting. The quiet grinding of talons announced their approach, and Mia took a step back. Shifting skin, claws on rock, breathing, sounds in the dead quiet as Vinicius held his breath. They, or it, were coming.

Something ahead moved in the darkness, and it came closer. Its body filled the passage. It was... fat. Very fat. But without light, she couldn't see any details.

Vinicius didn't care, and he didn't wait. He roared as he jumped the creature, with zero regard for his wounds or for not making noise. Not a silent takedown, but a display of sheer aggression and anger.

Whatever the thing in the tunnel was, it came forward toward them, and Mia squeaked as she jumped back. It wasn't just fat, it was long. Very, very long, and it had a face like an alligator as big as Vinicius's. It clicked in its long throat a few times, heavy clucks that sounded more like war drums, before it roared and shrieked.

It charged forward, body twisting and turning and filling the entire width of the tunnel. It crashed against Vinicius, and her bodyguard reared back as his weight proved miniscule compared to the size of the thing. But with time, the creature came to a stop, and Vinicius's body, pushed back and into the light, left a trail of deep gashes in the stone from his talons.

Two of Vinicius's arms held the titanic creature by the snout, and two pressed against its thick body and neck. It twisted, tried to bite him, but it had no arms to grab him. It was a graboid! From Tremors! Another old movie her previous guardian had insisted a five-year-old girl watch.

Vinicius got two hands between its jaws, fingers between its teeth, and pulled. His muscles flexed, blood trickled down his limbs, and his roar filled the tunnel as he pulled his two hands apart.

The creature managed another shriek before it twisted into a hiss of pain, and then a bloodcurdling scream of agony as something cracked, and the lower jaw broke away from the upper.

"Oh god!" Mia covered her ears and looked away. The sound died a second later, and she forced herself to look back at the chaos.

Vinicius stood there, panting, bleeding, in front of the corpse of a colossal monster. The child of Belial was a monster, too, but this was a genuine, bona fide horror monster, something that slithered through tunnels and was so thick it filled them.

"What... is that?" She did her best to not look at the creature's face, and how Vinicius had done more than crack open its jaw. Blood poured from its shredded mouth and neck, and soaked the thirsty stones.

"A wurm," he said.

"A hellbeast?"

"Yes."

"But, it's not twilight anymore. It's day!"

"The quakes and damage likely stirred it to action."

She threw up her hands. "So we have to worry about giant things like this!?"

Sighing, Vinicius pushed against the thick side of the creature. Fat and massive as the snake-like thing was, Vinicius half slid it, half rolled it across the stones enough to create room alongside its body.

"Can you--no, you can't," she said. "It doesn't have any resonance to eat, does it?"

"No. It has some essence."

"I'm not hungry." Gulping, she followed Vinicius and looked away from the horrible mess he'd made of the giant monster's face. He used his hands to keep its fat body from squishing him, and Mia occasionally had to do the same. It was warm, its dark skin leathery and thick, and a glance down showed it actually had feet, or at least talons, that stuck out from the sides of its belly. The only way it could get over bloodgrip and not rip its stomach open, probably.

"You should eat," Vinicius said.

"Why do you care?"

He glanced over his shoulder with a snarl.

"You're a liability if drained."

"I ate a few days ago, and I haven't been injured. Good enough for a human for months, right?"

"You're not human."

"Hey..." Fuck, it pissed her off hearing him say that. Pissed her off more, because he was probably right.

"And you use that aura frequently."

"It..." It might have been draining her 'reserves' to use her aura. If that was true, she probably should eat.

She did not want to eat the heart of a giant hellbeast. If eating a demon heart hit her with their memories, the fuck sort of things would she see if she ate the heart of a hellbeast? Maybe nothing, since they didn't store resonance, and maybe it was the resonance giving her the memories? Ugh, where was David to figure this stuff out for her.

On the other side of a canyon a couple kilometers wide and as long as Canada. Ugh.

"If that dream," she said between grunts as she pushed against the beast's body, "is actually a vision, then... is that something that's going to happen?"

He snorted. "No one can see the future."

"Really? I figured with all the craziness of the afterlife, which is all really magical in a sick, twisted sorta way, seeing the future would be possible."

"No one can see the future. No one can change the past. No one."

"No one can? That... makes sense." She'd heard David go on this rant before. Violating the 'chain of causality' was a gimmick used by poor writers, according to him. She never really minded it when stories did dumb stuff like that, but it sent poor David right up the wall, almost as much as multiverse stuff did. And alternate universe stuff. And... a lot of stuff.

"No one."

"You sound pretty sure."

He snorted again, slipped past the tail end of the giant beast, kept walking, and said nothing. He was the opposite of Zel. Never wanted to talk, explain himself, listen to himself talk, anything. It'd been a great way for Mia to learn about Hell, Zel's constant boasting and whatnot, but Vinicius didn't give her an inch.

"Think my brother got the vision, too?"

He clucked once as he snorted.

"The woman wasn't me," she said, "and the angel that killed her, a man, they... they were ruthless."

"Angels are ruthless."

Finally, some information.

"You've met angels before?"

Another snort. So much for that.

Sighing, she slipped out from around the big fat tail of the wurm, and looked ahead. More tunnel. Ugh.

Vinicius did not want to talk. Much as she didn't want to talk to him, she did want to talk about all the things that'd happened to her. Not Hannah or Adron or Kas. They'd had that conversation, and Vinicius was a cold, heartless asshole about it. But other things, like the vision, or her strange abilities, or Hell in general, she wanted to talk about those things.

But her traveling partner wasn't interested in that, either. Far as he was concerned, she could be the literal key to saving the universe from who knew what, and all he wanted to do was get her to release him so he could go back to being a murdering, raping psychopath!

She wanted to talk about the electric jolt the vision had sent through her, the same jolt she'd felt when she'd touched David. And she couldn't. Fuck.

She hoped David was having a better time than her.

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~~David~~

He sat up, clutching his chest. Eyes wide, he looked around. Not a swamp. No bog of black water, trenches filled with bones and gore, or thick fog that warped the color of the fire sky. No giant mounds of maggots. No angel, stabbing him through the heart.

It hadn't been him. It'd been someone else, a girl, and not Mia, either. No freckles on the arms.

"David? What's wrong?" Jes asked. She squatted nearby, half facing the exit to their small alcove, half facing Acelina, who sat across from David. The taller demon sat up slowly, coming to wake with the ending of night.

"I... I... had a dream."

Jes tilted her head to the side, stared at him for a few seconds, and came closer.

"You what?"

"I... had a dream. I was... a girl."

"Uh, what? Mia?"

"No, someone else. I was running through a black swamp. There were maggots everywhere, the air was dark, trenches lined the ground like veins and were filled with intestines."

"The Black Valley," Acelina said, stretching her wings. "You dreamt of the Black Valley?"

"Did I? I don't know. I thought people didn't dream in the afterlife?"

"They don't," Jes said. "What else?"

"I was running, or the girl in the dream was. She fell, and... an angel stabbed her, straight through the heart."

"Jesus christ," Jes said, and she sat down next to him. "That's fucked up. First and only dream in Hell and it's a death omen?"

"I don't know if it was a death omen or whatever. It was... random. I have no connection to this girl, and--"

"See her reflection anywhere?" Jes asked.

"No. I don't know what she completely looks... looked like, but--oooh, you think she was an unmarked?"

"After what we learned, I have to guess yeah, sounds like she probably was."

He sat back and covered his face with his hands.

"I felt her die. I felt..." He shivered and rubbed his arms. "Fucking god, that was messed up."

"Sounds like you're connected to the other unmarked. Sounds like... Sounds like something to talk to Caera about, when this bitch isn't around." She gestured to Acelina with a wing.

"Please," Acelina said with a snooty laugh. "You have told me much, whether you meant to or not."

"Yeap, we have. I should probably kill you so you don't tell anyone."

With a heavy scoff, Acelina got to her hooves.

"Don't be ridiculous. I am trapped by circumstance. Who could I talk to?"

"Oh I dunno, Domicela?"

Acelina folded her arms under her breasts, and her wings over her shoulders, cape style.

"Perhaps, but Domicela is separated from the Death's Grip spire, regardless. She has little means to take advantage of the situation, if she would even want to. And, I will owe you for helping me. Do you trust me so little?"

"Yes, I trust you so little."

Acelina grinned. "Prudent."

"Ugh, shut up." Jes got up and helped David do the same. "No one dreams in Hell. If you saw something while you were sleeping, something that specific, yeah, I can only guess it was another unmarked."

He hadn't told Jes about the symbols in his head since touching Mia, or the way it'd felt electrically charged. It was just a mess in his mind that didn't make sense yet. Soon, he'd say something, probably when talking with Caera, but for the moment he just wanted to think about shit.

He held out a hand in front of him and gently squeezed the air. He felt... different. Dying in that dream had been horrific, but it'd come with a jolt, too, like someone had shocked his spine. It felt all too similar to the sensation he'd first felt when touching Mia.

Something had changed.

Something inside him wanted to... pluck strings.

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"Holy shit," he whispered.

"Holy shit," Jes whispered.

Acelina clicked once.

The valley was a mess of bodies. More demons had come since David had run through the battle, many in black armor, many naked, not a one in gold. Probably stripped and taken to the leaning spire. Imps and grems swarmed over the valley by the thousands, ripping and tearing at the corpses, along with larger demons looking for easy meals. Not even twenty-four hours later and the hundreds of dead looked thoroughly picked clean, rib cages ripped open.

No sign of the giant lizard hellbeast. Did it fall into the canyon? Not likely. He'd have noticed a Godzilla creature falling into the ravine, probably accompanied by a deafening roar, even with the rider trying to kill him. It must have escaped. Not that it would have been of much value to demons dead, considering hellbeasts didn't store any resonance in their bodies. No point in eating them.

So many demons. Thousands. They flowed in and out of the spire, jumped and glided from its balconies, but none attempted to fly across the ravine. It had to be a mile wide, maybe more, and nothing heavier than an imp or grem was gliding across it. And that was just width. The length of the canyon, now that he was above it, was just as absurd. It didn't stop. It just went on, and on, and on, until it blurred into the distance with the reds and blacks.

A crack. It was like Hell was a piece of glass, and someone had cracked it, creating a huge, thin vein that ran its length.

The spire was doing a little better, not tilting or leaning as much. It was healing. The base half was already regrowing its flesh walls, bones and muscle reforming along the black metal skeleton. At this rate, it'd probably take a month for the spire to fully heal, but that didn't change that its base was still half exposed, the other half holding onto the cliff face of the ravine.

"I didn't realize there were so many demons nearby," he said, gesturing to the thousands of demons big and small that filled the valley. Many stood by the ravine on the spire's side, looking down into the pit. Not as many stood on his side of the canyon, but the hundreds that did looked just as confused. Thankfully, they were all too distracted by their hunt for food, armor, weapons, and the confusion of the void below, to bother looking toward the mountains where David and the two ladies journeyed.

"The attack was swift," Acelina said, and she crouched over the edge of the canyon where it split and weaved between the base of their mountain and other mountains. "If Zelandariel had had time, she could have perhaps summoned the horde. Thousands, tens of thousands of demons would have arrived within hours."

"Exaggerating a bit, there," Jes said, shrugging.

Snarling, Acelina shook her head and looked down over the edge of the canyon.

"Last Zelandariel told me, she believed Death's Grip had at least a hundred thousand demons, not including the imps and grems. Her dueling rule worked well."

Jes whistled. "Okay, yeah, that's more than I figured."

"I believe it," David said, gesturing out to the demons down in the valley. "What happened to the demons in aera armor?"

"They got butchered," Jes said. "Eventually, anyway. They took down a few hundred demons before they went down."

"The rider sacrificed them?" David asked. "That's... cruel."

Acelina aimed her eyeless gaze David's way, paused, said nothing, and looked back down into the emptiness below. The void remained, stirring and shifting, motionless and eternal. And just like last time, cold chills ran through David's limbs. He couldn't look at it too long.

"I suppose you have no clue what that is," Acelina said.

Jes and David shook their heads. Much as David had shared some secrets with Acelina, telling her about the invisible thing that'd tried to kill him a week ago was a bit too far. Let Caera make that call.

"Of course not." With a growl, Acelina flared her wings as she squatted down at the canyon edge. "Whatever it is, whatever has happened, I can only guess at the ramifications." She rolled a rock into the canyon. By the time it reached the bottom, just a speck in the distance, it broke apart before reaching the void. Broke, and vanished. "What... is that?"