The Pleasures of Hell
Copyright© 2023 by Novus Animus
Chapter 74
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 74 - An epic fantasy adventure through Hell, with demons and angels, and a couple humans with targets painted on their back. David and Mia didn’t want to be a part of this, but their unexpected first deaths land them in the middle of events grand and beyond knowing. Why are they in Hell in the first place? Why don’t they have the mark of the Beast, like other souls do? And why does everyone either want them, or want them dead?
Caution: This Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Mult Consensual Reluctant Lesbian Heterosexual Fiction High Fantasy Horror Paranormal Demons DomSub MaleDom FemaleDom Spanking Gang Bang Group Sex Harem Orgy Anal Sex Double Penetration Exhibitionism First Lactation Oral Sex Petting Tit-Fucking Big Breasts Size
~~50 years before the Arrival~~
~~Keziah~~
Light flooded her mind. Knowledge came next, pouring through her vessel, bestowing her with context and meaning. Light. Mind. Words that had no meaning before now had them.
Wet. She was in water.
She stepped out from under a waterfall and looked around at the room where four other people waited with warm smiles. They wore revealing white silks, beautiful, flowing gold tattoos, and enormous wings of white feathers jutted from their backs.
Angels. Like her.
Keziah took a breath. Yes, that was her name. Keziah. She looked around the room again and took a breath of relief. Home. Etched deep into her mind, she knew, this was home. Heaven. Gold walls that sparkled but did not shine too brightly. White stone. White hanging curtains of see-through silk. A small waterfall flowed down from a colossal hole in the ceiling overhead, entering a shallow pool below that she stood within, water that reached her waist.
She stretched out her wings, engaging muscles she knew she had, but only upon using them for the first time did she truly understand what they were, where they were, and how they were. She did the same for her fists. Strong fists. She looked down at her naked body and admired the perfect beauty of it. She was one of God’s warriors, after all, and all angels were beauty and perfection incarnate, crafted and sculpted.
The four angels standing on the edge of the indoor pool gestured to a wall where a giant mirror awaited. She walked through the water and admired her reflection while the water gently flowed around her hips.
She was a muscular woman, with defined abdominals, and strong arms, and thick legs. The knowledge given to her upon birth told her the truth: she was larger than most female angels, a little taller at nearly seven feet tall, and built with a little more muscle, more meat. But despite that, she had a narrow waist, highlighting her feminine figure, and large breasts that sat upon her chest well, pushed outward by the muscle underneath. A few gold tattoos flowed along her dark, dark skin, and her eyes shone a sparkling blue.
No. Not blue. Words flew through her mind, and she latched onto them. Souls would recognize them as blue. She would know them as azure, one of the thousands of God’s most beautiful colors.
She blinked at her reflection and ran her fingers along her hair. White, almost shining. A modern choice for hair color, the information in her mind told her. One side of her head had long, flowing hair, while the other was ... cornrows? Tiny braids tight to her scalp that ran horizontal along her skull. Beautiful, and modern again.
Modern. What was modern? She dug through her mind and the nigh-infinite knowledge waiting for her there. It was the nineties, according to the information, and the souls that spoke with angels. What were the nineties? And what were souls? She could see the definitions in her mind, but they were just words.
And behind those words were three runes. And these she understood.
She turned and looked at her side in the mirror. Yes, God had given her a body for battle, muscles defined and strong, but also pristine beauty, with a large buttock that complimented her muscular physique and large breasts. A perfect body for one of his soldiers.
She held out a hand to the mirror and summoned potram. In a gentle flash of gold light, she was clothed. The rune was light, like the feather of an angel’s wing. She froze and tilted her head, admiring the clothes God gave her. Flowing white silks that did a poor job of covering her skin, but that was not their goal. Their goal was to look gorgeous and be freeing. She smiled, slowly turned, and admired the jewelry: a necklace, earrings, nipple piercings under the silk, a navel piercing, and rings, all subtle, meant to accent her body, not detract attention from it.
The other runes were too heavy for her, royam and batlam. She tried them, took a deep breath, and tried again, but they resisted.
“I am ... Keziah.”
“Then rest, Keziah,” an angel said. “You are mere minutes born. Rest.”
She nodded. Rest made sense. Eventually, she would step out of the room, and she knew what awaited her: Heaven, and a billion experiences that would overwhelm her. Souls. Angels. The golden cities of the Heavenly Islands. The beaches of silver and gold sand, and their crystal, brilliant waters.
She stepped out of the pool onto the golden steps, and waited at the door. Not a door, but an archway with only hanging white silk to cover the entrance, and the pool turned into a small river that flowed within a shallow gold trench under the curtains, and out into Heaven beyond.
Another angel nodded deeply to her, and she returned it in kind.
“Keziah, Rapholem. First rank, and freshly born in Yathael,” they said.
Rapholem. First rank. Yathael, one of the nine Heavenly Islands. More words her fellow angels did not need to explain to her. She knew them already.
She was an angel. A warrior of God. It was her duty to care for the souls of Heaven, defend them, let them move on and into the Great Tower when they wished, and if it came to it, it was her duty to sacrifice her life to defend Heaven’s walls from invaders.
All words. And as she stared at the silk curtain separating her from giving those words meaning, she stopped. But an angel took her hand and smiled at her.
“It is always overwhelming for a newborn angel,” he said. “Take your time, Keziah.”
She nodded, took a breath, and braced herself. That was what the Rapholem did. They were the shields of Heaven, of God. It was their duty to survive any attack.
She stepped out into the golden city, the center of the Heavenly Island Yathael, and she froze.
Above her, endless galaxies floated by, nebulae and stars, moons and sparking comets. Nighttime in Heaven. What would it look like during the day? Would this facsimile of the surface world, this night sky of wonder and magic, look like the day, with a burning sun searing the sky with all its glory?
She gulped and looked out at the streets before her. Human souls, running and playing, throwing discs or balls to catch. Some flew kites. Some danced on rooftops, or in the archways where white silk curtains were their only barrier between their rooms and the outside world. Some sat on benches in groups and told stories, laughing. Some kissed and hugged each other, but this section of Yathael allowed children, so they did not take it further.
With a trembling step, Keziah walked down the street, and her four angels walked with her. Some children ran by, waved up at her, but wrapped in their own game, they did not wait for her to return it, instead devolving into a mess of laughter as they chased each other, playing tag. Some men and women nodded to her, perhaps knowing she had just been born, or perhaps because they had never seen her before.
They walked past rooms full of souls, sitting on white chairs set in a circle, while a gabriem sat with them, speaking about pain and loss. Keziah listened, rent asunder by words. Parents lost to disease. Siblings lost to shortsightedness. Children lost to tragic accidents. A room for the grieving to grieve, except in reverse. This was the afterlife.
She continued down the gold streets, propelled, each step fraught with mental impact she could not comprehend, but each room she peeked into, each soul she met demanded she keep walking.
A woman watched her husband in a scrying pool; the man still alive, the woman in wait. And nearby, a man did the same with his daughter. Both smiled, watching the most precious people in their existence struggle to live without them. The woman, the man, they would wait for their loved ones in Heaven.
Keziah continued on.
The colossal city of flowing, golden buildings, full of rooms with only curtains for walls, opened up before her. Gardens with sparkling water and small waterfalls. Giant palaces with no walls at all, only pillars, filled with chatting souls wearing white togas and similar attire. Past the city edge, literal clouds awaited, and souls walked over the fluffy white, losing themselves in delightful conversation.
Human laughter. Human delight. It struck her with wonder.
She recognized things before her angel comrades explained them. The sanctum, a giant room with no windows because the contents allowed the people within to experience any fantasy they wanted; a sort of virtual reality, the souls explained, for the truly odd or unique experiences only a human imagination could invent.
As Keziah’s wandering took her into a different section of Yathael, the atmosphere changed. Shallow pools sat out in the open, and within, souls and gabriem angels sat, naked. In each and every bathhouse Keziah passed, many of the souls within were having sex, sometimes with each other, but usually with a gabriem.
One gabriem, a male, sat and relaxed in the pool, back to its wall, his elbows resting on the pool edge, while a tiny little woman danced on his lap. A small peek over the man’s shoulder showed it was no simple lap dance, but a sexual one, the angel’s large girth buried deep inside the woman. Beside her, only a meter away, a female gabriem sat on a male soul’s lap, giving a similar dance. Both souls were small compared to the angels, but that only seemed to make them enjoy the sex more.
The sights continued, always the same. In some pools a single male soul spent time with several female gabriem. Sometimes it was the other way around, or the soul and angel were reversed. Sometimes they were the same sex. In some pools, it was an orgy. And on more than a few occasions, she found a pool full of human souls with no angels at all, and the souls pleasured each other with smiles on their faces.
But Keziah never spotted an angel being romantic with another angel, not once.
In the distance closer to the city edge, was a special river. The knowledge in her mind told her what it was, but the sight of the flowing water with gold orbs floating within struck her with awe. The river of memories. Here, souls could summon the memories of someone who had passed on into the Great Tower. The river would give the memories a body to steer, but it would not be a true creation; souls never stayed in Heaven forever, and the ancestral mimic would not have a soul. But if a soul wanted to speak with an ancestor, they could.
As she watched the souls step into the water, and the floating orbs of gold floated past them, it quickly became apparent most souls did not want to summon their ancestors. They wanted to summon their pets, and they did. The river gave the reborn pets bodies, gave them their memories, and even their souls back. Animal souls were unique to human souls, and the river of memories could draw them back from the Great Tower to be reunited with their owners.
Souls stepped out of the river with pets of all kinds. And they always came up from the water with tears in their eyes, as they stepped back onto the gold and white roads of the gold city, their faithful companion at their side or in their arms.
Keziah stayed there for a while, watching souls step into the river, scoop up a gold orb floating by, and summon their memory. Each and every time, their faces lit up with a magnificent wonder that robbed Keziah of breath. She stared at them, fascinated, mesmerized by the hurricanes of emotion the humans brought to bear.
Keziah had been wrong. Dead wrong. She was not beautiful. She was nothing. She was a cutout creation, a sculpted thing with none of the depth of a soul, none of the layers. Souls were a cascade of nuance, an avalanche of experience and growth. Souls were ... like the Great Tower.
It was the souls who were beautiful, not angels.
The Great Tower. What was it? Knowledge flowed through her mind, but it lacked any details. The Great Tower was existence. It was life. It was death. It was the world they stood on, and the worlds below. It was where souls were birthed, where they gathered life experience, and brought it back to the Great Tower itself to ... to what?
Keziah stretched her wings and took to the air. Something was wrong.
“The library,” she said as her angel escort followed her. “Take me there.”
The other angels nodded and guided her, but the look on their faces told her what she would find.
Keziah poured through the books. Colossal shelves of gold surrounded her, lined with uncountable knowledge, books with covers of rich colors of angel eyes: quartz, obsidian, amethyst, and silver. Most books were the creations of humans, but the non-fiction books, the ones that accounted of the details of Heaven in her infancy, were written by angels. Diaries. Accounts of the Great Tower through millions upon millions of years. But no account reached back far enough.
There were no answers.
She looked to the angels escorting her, but found only the same disappointment. They sat around the colossal table with her, looked at the books they had all read before, and shook their heads.
“Only the council may read the first books,” they said.
Sighing, Keziah picked up her gold book and set it back within the shelves of the great library. She wandered the halls, past hundreds of thousands of books from the human mind, and wandered through the quiet permanence of the books written by angels. Words upon words, and she devoured them, searching for an answer to a question she could not yet articulate.
She stopped and faced the four angels escorting her. They waited, eyes heavy. They knew what she was going to say before she had found the words.
“Where is God?” she asked.
They shook their heads. They did not know.
They left her after that. It was a process all new angels went through, learning about Heaven, Hell, the Great Tower, life, only to be left confused by the gaps in their knowledge. And once she, a newborn angel, was left empty and confused, her escorts deemed it fit to abandon her to her fate.
Keziah left the great library and sat upon the outer walls circling her home, the Heavenly Island Yathael. Thousands of fellow rapholem stood upon the wall, facing out toward the great clouds of Heaven, and the distant vortex that penetrated its base. Not since the First War had anything from Hell reached Heaven through the vortex, and even that, Keziah could not know for sure, not when the first books were forbidden by the council.
So she sat, letting her legs dangle off the high wall of gold brick, and stared out toward the inside of Yathael, to the great gold city and its flowing streets, tall buildings, and beautiful souls.
“Keziah,” a voice said.
She made to stand, but the man shook his head and raised a hand. Instead, the man sat with her, and did as she did, letting his legs dangle over the top of the great wall of gold stone and merlon outcroppings. Humans called them castle walls, and it was true; they looked like the walls of human history. All the stranger for two angels wearing the loose, revealing silks of their potram runes, to sit upon and face within. Some adventurous humans at the base of the wall looked up at them in curiosity, and the new angel spared them a nod.
“Captain Benjamin,” Keziah said.
“I didn’t realize we’d already been introduced.” The man smiled at her. He had dark tan skin, deep eyes, and long black hair with no facial hair. Humans would have described him as Indigenous American, the way they said Keziah looked African. He was handsome, like all angels, but the truth had robbed her of the joy of seeing that handsomeness. He was a cutout creation, like her.
“Others told me to see you,” she said. “And I ... had planned to do that.”
“But?”
“But I am ... despondent.”
“Oh?”
She nodded and gestured out toward Yathael, a city of joy and beauty and pleasure and healing, with beaches of silver, flowing rivers of crystal blue, and trees of green, all surrounded by white cloud, underneath a sky of stars and nebulae and galaxies. She should have been overjoyed with her existence. She was not.
“I have been born into misery, captain.”
The captain sighed, nodded, and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It has become routine, young angel, that we must apologize to the newly birthed for the state of Heaven. God has abandoned us.” The words stung. “The council ignores us. And the purpose of the Great Tower and the inner-workings of its cogs remain an unknowable mystery.”
Each word crushed her grace, and she slumped.
“Why was I born at all?” she asked. “Lucifer is trapped in the Forgotten Place — we can only assume, anyway. The demons war among themselves, and even if they didn’t, they could not reach Heaven without Lucifer’s help. Heaven does not need new angels. Heaven—”
“For the souls, Keziah.”
She shook her head. “I am no gabriem. The souls do not need me, a rapholem. I am ... cold, as the souls would say.”
Benjamin smiled at her and patted her shoulder with a wing. “I am a gabriem, so listen to my words, young rapholem. Heaven is in a state of decay. Many of us are millions upon millions of years old, and the dread eats at our minds and grace. Some of us are reborn so many times, our previous lives are blurs. Worse still, some angels kill themselves, unable to accept the dread.”
“I do not understand. This dread must surely have been a part of God’s plan?”
Benjamin shook his head. “I do not think it was ever in God’s plan to leave the Great Tower, young rapholem. If we could bask in God’s presence, surely the dread would never affect us. But...” He shrugged and gestured out to the city with a wing. “It does not matter. For all the pain and misery you have been born into, it is worth it, Keziah.”
“How?”
Benjamin’s smile was perfect. The smile of a gabriem, of a man who had helped untold humans, and likely untold angels, for aeons.
“Go to the river of memories.”
“I visited—”
“No. Go to the river of memories, young rapholem, and watch. Truly watch. You will understand.”
It took a month before she listened to her captain’s order. She spent the first month of her life sitting on the walls of Yathael, watching the city at a distance, and let the talons of the dread sink into her grace. She was a holy warrior of God, and God was nowhere to be found. The only people who might know, the council, would not speak to her or any other angel. Even when a council angel stood at the gate and oversaw the flow of new souls, the council angel ignored all other angels. Silence was an angel’s reward for faith and duty.
Before despair dragged her down into an early death, she took to the sky, and flew to the river of memories.
There were many rivers in Yathael. The city was colossal, large enough to house hundreds of millions of souls, and it had many sections. Some sections were lush with green. Others were filled with titanic buildings of gold, with silver ornaments and white silks. The roads shone, and the souls walking them vibrated with joy. But not all souls were happy.
Keziah returned to the first river of memories she had visited on her first day of life. Riverbanks of silver sand sparkled under the starlight above, and this far from the city’s center, the air was still with silence. Trees grew tall and wide, covered in lush leaves, and hidden colors glittered within the cracks of their bark. It was a place of quiet, and peace.
The long river showed a few souls, each spaced out and left to their solace, save for their escort. Each soul that came to the river of memories had a gabriem angel, ready to guide and tend them, and many souls leaned on their angel for advice or support as they delved into the past. Some souls summoned the memory of an ancestor, someone who had long since died, went to Heaven—or Hell, had since passed on to the Great Tower, and the river created a soulless vessel for their eternal memory. If you wished to speak with Genghis Khan, you could.
But most souls came for something very different.
“Mister Tolly,” a gabriem said. “If you would just—”
“This is it, right?” a man said, stepping out from the treeline and along the silver sands. Even with his prime body, gifted to him by Heaven herself, it was clear the man was old. Souls who had died of old age had an air about them that their new bodies could not hide.
The man walked down the beach as if he had seen it before, as if the long shore of sparkling silver, and the perfect water flowing between its banks meant nothing to him. The endless beauty above shining in the dark, wonders beyond imagining, none of it caught the man’s eye. The gabriem woman, gloriously beautiful and half naked with how revealing her potram rune was, did not catch the man’s eye either.
“You’re sure this thing will bring him back?” Mister Tolly asked, voice firm and filled with classic cynicism. Keziah liked him. She watched from the other side of the river hid her smile.
“Yes, Mister Tolly,” the gabriem said. Usually, angels referred to people by their first names. Whoever this Tolly was, he must have insisted the angel call him by his last name. Delightfully stubborn. Keziah liked him more. “But it is not a simple matter to call upon the memory. You must enter the water and reach out of the flow of the river. Your mind will touch the Great Tower, and—”
“Don’t lecture me about memories, angel! Now cover up your tits.” He gestured back at the woman and her revealing toga.
Was he here to resurrect a child? The truly young, too young to reason, did not go to Heaven or Hell. They merged with the Great Tower directly, unburdened by resonance. More than their memory could be called. A piece of their soul could be summoned.
More than a few mothers and fathers had summoned the memory of a child lost in the single day Keziah had come to the river. Those were the times a gabriem was truly needed, to catch the frail souls as their emotions fluctuated between sorrow and elation, only to fall to sorrow again when they realized the memory of their baby could not grow in Heaven. You could only grow by being alive, truly alive.
Sometimes the parents left with their babies. Sometimes they did not. And sometimes, parents returned to the river with a baby they had been caring for for weeks, or months, or years. A joyful pain, to hold your lost baby, but never able to see them grow, to develop awareness and identity. With great tears, the parents let their baby go. In those moments, Keziah was thankful she was no gabriem.
“Mister Tolly,” the angel said, standing on the riverbank as her patient waded in until he was waist-deep. “I am trying to make this process easier for you. If you would please just listen to me.”
“I don’t need some half-naked harlot to tell me how to call my back my boy!”
The angel glared, fists on her hips. Keziah did her best to bite down a chuckle, and failed.
Mister Tolly, speaking Estian as everyone did, looked perhaps in his late twenties, with pale skin, long red hair, freckles, and a tall, lean frame. Like all fresh souls, he wore a white toga that covered most of him, but he did not hesitate to get it wet as he stepped into the water, and watched the floating, gold orbs pass on by.
Whether he knew what to do or not, Mister Tolly closed his eyes, scooped up one of the gold orbs, lowered it into the water, and waited.
The gabriem sighed, looked across the river to Keziah, and spared a small nod. Keziah returned it. The gabriem was beyond beautiful, but they both knew she was nothing compared to the man in the river. His hunched posture he no longer needed. The bite in his words. The way he flexed one cheek more than the other when he spoke. The squint in one eye. The aggressive inflections in his voice that almost danced along a sea shanty’s pitch. Habits forged through life, nuance that contained a billion layers of depth no angel could duplicate.
The man stood back up, and a bundle of beige and white came up from the water with him. It did not move at first, but a gasp from Mister Tolly awoke the being from its sleep.
The dog — a pembroke welsh corgi — barked up at the man, and Mister Tolly choked on a sob. He clutched the dog close to him, squeezed him, spun him around, and water swung free of his toga as he buried his face in his dog’s mane. The corgi barked excitedly, little legs paddling air as his owner held him above the water.
“Told ya!” the old man said, and he walked through the water back to the shore, and grinned up at the angel before he fell to his knees in the silver sand. He clutched his dog tighter, buried him in hugs, and the dog returned his love with as many licks as he could muster.
An old man and his dog.
Children too young to reason were not the only ones who bypassed Heaven and Hell entirely. Pets, and all animals, went to the Great Tower when they died. And if you had the memory of them, you could summon their soul from the Great Tower itself, through the river, and by the grace of Heaven, it would be given a body, and the memories that belonged to it.
Tolly set down his dog, and the boy ran circles around his owner before pressing up against his leg to stand. And grumpy Mister Tolly clapped his hands together once and gestured down at the dog. The joy on the old man’s young face was beyond knowing.
“This is Tofu,” Tolly said to his gabriem.
The woman laughed. “Tofu?”
“I never gave tofu a shot, growing up. The food, I mean. But then I did, and I ended up liking it. Then I got a dog, and the rest was history.” Nodding, Mister Tolly got up and patted his toga. “Leash?”
“It is Heaven, Mister Tolly. A leash is—”
“Yeah, okay, but Tofu can get hyper. I’m sure he’ll try and steal someone’s ice cream.”
Chuckling, the gabriem set a hand on the old man’s young shoulder, and gestured back toward the trees. They walked together, and headed back to Yathael’s streets, with Tofu on his master’s heels.
Keziah watched them leave and smiled. She drew a wing around herself, combed her feathers, and watched other souls step into the river under the guidance of a gabriem. A couple, a man and woman, summoned a six-month-old child, only to let the child back into the river, to let her soul move on. A woman summoned the memory of an ancestor. But most who came into the river left with a pet in their arms. A dog. A cat. Birds, rodents, horses, mustelids. Everything. Connections formed with a creature that could not speak their language, and yet every soul that stepped out of the river with their pet reborn had a smile that could not be made any other way.
Sighing, Keziah stood up, stretched her wings, and took to the sky. Benjamin was right. This was worth fighting for. This was worth existing for.
The next day, she walked the walls with Benjamin once again, both wearing their batlam runes. The rune no longer felt heavy, and she flexed her fingers experimentally, watching the massive silver and gold gauntlet follow the curve of her digits. To her right, the wall showed the endless clouds of Heaven’s landscape, and the vortex beyond. To her left, Yathael, full of movement and wings.
“We do it for them,” she said, and she gestured to the city with a wing.
Benjamin nodded, smiling. His armor was not nearly as bulky as hers, and his helmet left his face exposed.
“I am sorry you were born into this afterlife,” he said. “Maybe it was different before my time. Maybe it was different, before humanity evolved into what it is now.”
“Do you think the dread was brought on by the growth of human civilization?”
The captain shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps the council knows.”
Her head sunk. “But the council will not speak to us.”
“Yes. We have no choice but to press on, young rapholem, and after what you saw yesterday, can you say you would abandon the souls of Heaven?”
“But I am a new angel. Was I truly needed?”
Benjamin gestured to her with his wing, smiling. “We need every angel, Keziah. Souls need us. And you will find reason to live through their happiness.”
She took a deep breath. It was true. A million facts walked through her mind, not gained by experience or living, but by the nature of her birth, facts put into her by the fountain, facts that made her a holy warrior from her first breath. But facts meant nothing. Knowledge meant nothing. It was experience that gave life, even an afterlife, meaning, and humans carried that in abundance.
“I am rapholem,” she said. “I ... do not know how to care for souls. I can protect, but is my protection even required?”
Her captain laughed and gestured to the city. “You are still young. And in Heaven, you have freedom. Go back to the city, and indulge in its pleasures, Keziah. Do not enter the great library. Do not delve into history that will not answer your worries. The dread comes for us all, but for now, you are young and immune to its claws. Go, spend time with souls, and enjoy God’s purpose.”
“But I am not a gabriem. I—”
Again, her captain laughed and shook his head. “Trust me, Keziah. There are many souls that will prefer your ... nature, to that of a gabriem’s.”
~~30 years before the Arrival~~