The Pleasures of Hell

“A deep strike into another province’s territory is almost always a death sentence for the demons sent. And I crave to join my soldiers in the slaughter. But spire auras have turned battles into endless skirmishes and border wars for millennia now, as you said. And if I die, there is nothing to stop Morgana’s forces from reaching the spire.” And just like that, Khazeer stood back up and thudded his chest like Zaavras had. “Make no mistake, unmarked. Demons are not humans. I want to fight. To die in battle? In a glorious wave of chaos? We crave such an end. Surely your tregeera lover—”

David waved a hand at Khazeer, and summoned a slab of rock from the ground, fast. A giant hunk of it, not sharp, but a flat platform of rock that crashed into the huge tetrad’s chest and sent the beast back ten meters. He crashed and rolled, gasping, wind knocked out of him.

Thousands of demons stood and stared. No one moved.

David walked over to Khazeer, stood over him, and glared.

“Caera was not some violence junky, you fucking warmonger. Not all demons are addicted to this ... this ... fucking insanity!” He spun again and faced the onlookers. Even the remnants sounded quiet. “All of you! Every last fucking one of you! You’re all so fucking convinced that this is all there is! I saw the battle. I was in the fucking middle of it. You all just gave into your violence auras like it was something you had to do! Like that was the whole point of this afterlife! Lucifer’s children, right? This is why he, they, IT, made you? To be soldiers in a war that ended billions of years ago!”

He summoned a rock platform and raised himself high into the air. If there weren’t any patrolling angels for him to worry about, there was no reason to hide. He summoned his armor and staff and slammed the weapon’s base into the rock.

“But I’ve seen it! I’ve seen demons find other reasons to enjoy life! But you, you’re obsessed. You’re all fucking obsessed, and stupid. You could grow past this. You could find other ways to exist, instead of this carousel of murder and war! You are not bound to this fate, but you keep choosing it anyway! Fuck you!” David held his hand, grabbed the air, and with a clenched fist, shook the ground. The hellquake tore rocks apart, splintered the stone beneath their claws and hooves, and knocked over thousands of demons. “You could be better than you are! But none of you have even fucking tried! Caera was an explorer! She wanted to learn about history, about all the secrets Hell has to offer. But I bet not one of you even read what I wrote on her tombstone. You’re all weak. Every. Last. One of you.”

Half the demons stirred and got to their feet. The other half stayed on their asses, staring at him. And David returned their stares, body trembling with rage that’d shot up through his spine and into his limbs. He could feel his heartbeat in his face and through his chest.

“David,” Jes said. She stood at the base of his rock platform, looking up at him, face pained. “They get it. We get it.”

David met her gaze. “I wasn’t talking about you girls. I was ... I was...”

Tsila was right. All it’d taken was a small poke from Khazeer, and here he was, ready to kill, ready to throw himself back into that fury. He could almost feel his bones grow.

Arms dangling at his sides, David sank his rock platform back into the ground. Khazeer had already gotten up, favoring a shoulder, and he glared at David with a mix of anger and respect typical for a brute who valued violence. Maybe if David dropped a fucking boulder on his head, he’d knock some sense into him.

“Unmarked,” Khazeer said. “I—”

David shook his head. “Let’s just get this over with. I’ll stay closer to the River Styx. You send your forces straight toward the spire.” David didn’t bother looking back. He marched forward, and a thousand demons stepped aside, some scampering out of his way as he crossed the border from red dirt and whirlpools of dying remnants, into the black foliage of Navameere Fields.

The girls joined him, Laoko and Sazillia taking the lead. Sazillia knew the province better than any of them, and she gestured to a path ahead toward what looked like a giant black forest.

Pegasus trotted up to David’s side and nudged into him again. Like someone had loosed the noose around his throat, relief washed over him, and he petted the small horse’s neck. If Pegasus were a different creature, he’d probably be afraid of David by now, but Pegasus could hear the music. The ramifications of that, David had no idea, but it seemed like Pegasus wasn’t bothered by it.

“David,” Jes said. She came up to his side, Daoka on his other side. “You just knocked over a few thousand demons.”

“Thanks for that,” Sazillia said, looking back with a playful smile.

David nodded. “Sorry.”

Daoka clicked, mirrored the nod, and touched his shoulder.

Jes translated. “She’s worried you’re going to summon the aliens.”

“Yeah,” David said. “I’m getting better with the music, and I’m getting better at finding that line. I know how hard I can push it without drawing Hell’s attention.” Which wasn’t a nice feeling. The ocean of song was inviting, and Hell’s presence within it called to him, like a mother happy to embrace her child. And he had to walk away from her every time he refused to play the music loudly.

He wanted to hold her. Mother Hell. He wanted to drift into her warm embrace, and feel ... welcome. Feel like he was home. A feeling he’d never had before, him or Mia.

“Getting pretty damn good at it, then,” Jes said. “Scary stuff.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Scary is good!” Sazillia said. “I understand you have a point to make, David, and I think you made it, but scary is useful.”

David looked back. Khazeer’s army no longer watched him, moving in an almost parallel direction toward the center of the enemy’s province. A few demons glanced his way and looked away quickly. They were scared of him. Demons, scared of him. Or scared of what he could transform into.

“I understand,” David said. “I just ... It sickens me, when demons say all demons are nothing but violence machines. That’s wrong. Caera proved that wrong. And you girls here prove it wrong, too.”

Daoka smiled and nodded, chirping away and gesturing back to Acelina and the Las.

“There is truth in that,” Acelina said. “My zotiva sisters and I craved violence as much as the next demon, but we spent many days enjoying other things. There was a certain ... joy, to be found in ensuring a particular egg grew well enough to be hatched.”

Laoko spoke up with a flick of one of her many wrists. “My time with Galon and his friends was spent not indulging in violence. We talked. I enjoyed our discussions about the nature of the Great Tower, and even about the ‘human condition.’” She air-quoted ‘human condition’ with all four hands. “Gabriem do oh so love to talk about souls.”

Tsila chuckled. Moriah looked down, glaring at nothing. Right, Galon, the angel she’d killed. The first angel-on-angel murder since the First War, supposedly. And judging from the slight smile from the curvy tetrad, she’d brought him up on purpose to give Moriah a jab.

David opened his mouth, and closed it. The fuck could he tell Laoko? Let it go?

---

The Navameere Fields greeted them with blade and thorn. Tacharius had been right. The whole damn province was hostile in a way you couldn’t appreciate until you were in the thick of it. Like a jungle, ominous but ultimately not exactly scary-looking from the outside, but the moment you were inside it, the sheer dread of it was all-too apparent.

Sazillia took them through a forest of black, sharp trees, each an array of giant thorns, but no branches. They stood as tall as the tetrad herself, and had no canopy. More like the group was walking through dense, barbed grass. Laoko, Sazillia, and Moriah pushed through, chopping the foliage down with their swords, Moriah in her armor. David could move the foliage with a song, but doing that all day would drain him pretty fast.

David yelped and jumped back when something touched his foot. A spider-like creature, not even a foot long, but it was thick, powerful for a little bug, and it had mandibles too big for its body. Yet another kind of Hell spider. Maybe it was blind, because the creature touched David once before turning, facing him, and lunging at his shin. Just like finding a bug in the middle of the night in a jungle.

Jes kicked it off him, and Daoka squashed it under a hoof.

“This,” David said, grumbling, “is going to be a pain to get through.”

“It will,” Sazillia said. “These fields are deadly, and filled with many hellbeasts who’ve learned to live in them.”

“Is the entire province covered in this?” David asked.

“Nah. There are paths, and we’re heading toward one now. But there are plenty of spots where we have to cut our way through. It’s shallow in places, but more dense. In some places, it’s all beachgrass, and the ground turns to sand.”

David winced. “Beachgrass? Like, American beachgrass?” Assuming Sazillia knew what that was. “That shit is sharp.”

“And here,” Sazillia said with a chuckle, “it is beyond sharp. Misstep and it will cut through a human’s skin easily enough to reach bone. You will bleed, and bleed.”

“I—” A sharp pain cut through David’s ankle, and he froze. Hellbeast? Some deadly insect with a nasty venom? Nope, just a random thorn from the remains of a giant black stalk, cut down by the girls ahead of him, but still a sharp, spiky mess. “I could use my batlam rune, for the armor. But I don’t know if I can trek across this province wearing that. I mean, I could—”

Acelina picked him up and set him on Pegasus’s back.

“Whoa!” David panicked, flailing for a moment before he grabbed the only thing he could think to grab: some of Pegasus’s neck spikes. They weren’t as hard as a horn, with a bit of give to them, bending just enough that they tilted in his grip when he held on.

Pegasus looked up and back at him, and made a strange, rumbling purring sound, mixed with a horse’s neigh. And he didn’t freak out, or thrash, or try to buck him off. Maybe the Las had prepared him for what being ridden would be like.

“Acelina!” David yelled, looking back. “You could have startled him! He’d have run right into those stalks”—he gestured to the wall of tall, black, spiky grass surrounding them—”and skewered himself to death!”

“Nonsense. You would have been skewered to death, perhaps, but Pegasus would have lived.” Her grin was positively evil.

“And you could have crushed my balls.”

Acelina laughed, exposing more of her shark teeth. “Yes, that is true. But as long as Pegasus does not gallop, you should be fine, yes?”

“I mean ... I guess. But what about his legs?”

Jeskura matched the spire mother’s laugh and gestured down at Pegasus’s ankles. David leaned over and watched the small horse crush thorns under his hooves, and what thorns brushed against his skin, Pegasus somehow either avoided getting stabbed by, or the thorn only scratched his leathery skin and didn’t cut.

David looked down at his own ankle. The thin skin was bleeding, dripping bits of crimson. And scarab-like hellbeasts crawled up from the soft ground and swarmed over it.

“Okay,” David said. “Yeah, okay, it’s probably best I don’t walk through this. I am too soft.”

“Far too soft,” Acelina said. “There is a reason our skin is usually dark.” With an almost theatrical flair, she threw a hoof down and crushed one of those cut-down stalks, sending shards of thorns scattering, and they bounced off the dark skin of her legs harmlessly.

Pegasus’s skin was dark red in most places, too. He seemed perfectly comfortable. And as long as he didn’t jump around or gallop, hopefully David’s testicles would be fine, too.

“A saddle,” Moriah said. “We will find some leather, or perhaps we kill some hellbeasts and make some leather ourselves? And then we could create a saddle for you.”

“I mean, maybe?” David said. “It’s not that easy to just make a saddle.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Jes said. “Maybe Caera can—”

Jes stopped, stared at David while the rest of the crew came to a slow stop too, and lowered her head. She looked back the way they’d come, over the destroyed black, branchless trees, and her tail slumped down to join the mess.

“Sorry,” she said.

Daoka was at her side in an instant, chirping and clicking at her, and the two leaned in to each other and pressed their foreheads together. Jes clicked a couple of times, too, and no one bothered to translate as the two resumed the walk.

Moriah and Tsila stared at the two demons before looking at David, confused. After all this time, they still didn’t get that demons were capable of the same emotions they were, and that he was. Even after hopping onto a rock and yelling at the top of his lungs at an entire army, they still weren’t entirely convinced.

The angry gargoyle saying ‘sorry’ put a bigger dent into their beliefs than David’s rant had.

David looked down at Pegasus’s neck. Not the same, but not all that far off either from Caera’s back, either. Dark red skin, big spikes, and him holding onto them to keep from falling off. Just like old times.

Except in a black forest of sharp thorns. Wings up and in, Acelina hissed and stomped a few thorns out of spite as they scraped along her membranes. The Las navigated the destruction easily, having grown up in Death’s Grips tunnels, full of bloodgrip, but Acelina again hissed and stomped a hoof.

“Is the entire province like this?” she asked.

“No,” Sazillia said, chopping down stalks with practiced ease. She’d done this before. “But like I said, these are the Navameere Fields, zotiva. We have to cut through this for a while before we work our way toward the coast.”

“The coast,” Laoko said, looking back, “will be more dangerous. Hellbeasts you cannot imagine lurk in those waters. Many sit on the shore. I believe some of them, the surface would call ... octopuses?”

Sazillia nodded. “Krakens.”

David’s gut clenched. “Sounds wonderful.”

Daoka raised a hand and chirped something.

“No idea,” Sazillia said. “Navameere was an angel, and he or she did something during the First War. That’s all anyone knows.”

David tilted his head and looked at Daoka, and she returned his look with an eyeless smile. Filling in for Caera, perhaps. He’d have hugged her if he wasn’t on a horse.