The Pleasures of Hell

She smiled into the kiss, her red eyes, black sclera and pupils, delving deep into him. No blinking. Her tongue found his lips, tasted them, and she nodded as she pulled away, crawled back to her side of the cave, and sat down like nothing had happened.

David looked down at Pegasus’s head still in his lap, and petted the horse’s neck. Either Laoko was manipulating him, or being sincere, or both. And in her mind, she was probably thinking: Can’t I do both?

---

~~Day 151~~

He woke to someone curled up at his side. And for just a fleeting second, he thought it was Caera. But each morning, that fleeting moment grew shorter and shorter. How long until it didn’t happen at all?

Daoka. She’d taken off her armor, and was facing him, lying beside him. More than just facing him, she was up against him, her breasts against his side while he slept on his back. The hard ground didn’t bother her pinned shoulder at all, and she smiled and chirped at him as she woke up, too. Rock wasn’t a fun sleeping surface, but honestly, after all these months sleeping on it, he wasn’t sure he missed his bed.

Nah, he did. Maybe he’d take Laoko up on that bed offer sometime.

On his other side was Jeskura, and the gargoyle sat up with a stretch of her wings. Naked, too. He’d gone to sleep while they were in armor. Maybe they’d wanted to cuddle him properly while he slept? Or maybe Laoko was right, and they missed the skin-on-skin contact.

It wasn’t sexual. Well, maybe a little. But the two demons weren’t cuddling him looking for sex, and both tightened their grips around his waist as they woke up. Maybe they were filling in for Caera on purpose? Like, maybe they didn’t know what to do to help him, and this was all they could think of? Maybe they thought he wanted to wake up to the feel of a warm body snuggled up to him, even if it wasn’t Caera?

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Jeskura said, and leaned over and gave him a kiss.

Daoka chirped at him, gave him the same kiss, gave her lover a drive-by kiss, and both ladies got to work putting their armor back on.

David watched. It’d only been a couple of weeks since the battle, and his sex drive warred against the cold ache in his gut. But it was nice to feel a kernel of that warmth again as he watched the two ladies get dressed, the ones who’d taken his virginity. Jeskura, nearly seven feet tall, lean, with breasts surprisingly large considering her athletic frame. And Daoka, busty, curvy, voluptuous, yet somehow still had some of that athletic physique all demons had.

Jes looked back over her shoulder at him, grinned, wagged her tail at him, and got dressed without saying a word.

Acelina got up, spent time with the Las, adjusting their armor, and spent a little time with Pegasus too, checking his hooves and wings. She spared an eyeless glance for David, but whatever she had on her mind, she kept it to herself.

“So far so good,” Sazillia said. Up on her clawed feet, she did some stretches; completely unnecessary, but probably something she picked up watching scrying pools. “We’re getting closer to the River Styx than I’d like, but I suppose Morgana is the bigger threat.”

“Perhaps,” Laoko said, standing up with her fellow tetrad. “The hellbeasts of the sea could kill us all, easily.”

Sazillia shook her head. “Not with David here and his magic.”

David held up a hand. “Playing music takes time. I can’t do it instantly. If we get ambushed, I need you girls to save me, not the other way around.”

Khazeer’s bailiff sighed and gave her tail a flick. “And you still can’t transform again?”

“I’m trying. It’s not working.”

“Think you’ll be able to transform in the future when it’s convenient?”

Head tilted, David squinted up at the tetrad as Pegasus nudged against his arm. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, using Pegasus’s neck to help him stand up. The horse was getting bigger every day.

“Nothing,” Sazillia said. “But it would be strangely convenient if you could transform when it was needed, and only then.”

“I told you, Sazillia. Far as I can tell, the transforming thing isn’t something I can just do. It happens when I feel it. After what happened last time, let’s hope it never happens again, okay?”

Sazillia met his gaze without so much as a blink. “I wonder. If you truly are part archangel yourself, and your body responds to your emotions, if others die—”

David took a step toward her. And for all her courage and resilience, the tetrad took a quick step back.

“If it comes to that, then maybe something will happen,” he said. “I don’t know. Okay? I don’t fucking know. But we’re not going to operate under the pretense I can use this strange ability at all. Because I can’t.” He held out his hand to his side and told it to grow. Nothing.

“I was just thinking out loud,” Sazillia said, shrugging. “I would be a fool to not consider your power, David. And you would be a fool to not wonder how to harness it.”

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking. But if something like ... last time, has to happen again? No. We’ll get to False Gate without it.”

Sazillia nodded, almost a bow, and found her old smile again. “As you wish.”

David nodded, did a slow turn to check on all the girls — everyone was fine — and held up his hands. A simple tune to open the cave ceiling and guide them back out into the Navameere Fields.

They couldn’t see the River Styx yet, not with a million sharp trees blocking them, but at least they had a road to follow. No more chopping down foliage like explorers working through a jungle. Instead, every step was black sand, shifting under their claws and hooves, and black scarabs rose to meet their toes, biting and clawing.

It wasn’t long before David was on Pegasus’s back again. Was he bigger than yesterday? A little? Hard to tell from day to day, but Pegasus’s appetite was endless. How big would he get?

And riding him wasn’t so bad. Sure, David had to find a very specific spot to sit, and leaning forward was still a problem, testicles in the way and all that. But for now, he could sit mostly comfortably and avoid the nibbling teeth and scratching claws of the dozens of large bugs at their feet.

“I’m not an arachnophobe,” he said, looking down at the black sand and the scurrying creatures dying under Pegasus’s hooves. “But this is gross.” Despite the size of the group, most of the bugs came for Pegasus. For him. Maybe they could smell him?

Pegasus whined, stomped his hooves, and bugs crunched and splattered under the mount’s growing weight. A centipede-like creature worked its way up Pegasus’s leg, turning his whine into a loud whinny. But Acelina was at his side in a moment, snatched the creature away, threw it down, and stomped it. Hooves were the weapon of choice in this land.

A group of souls ran by, bleeding from a thousand cuts, with random numbers on their foreheads. Weaving between bushes and trees of black blades, the humans stopped and stared at David’s group. And screamed. Before David could get a word out, they turned and bolted, disappearing into the jungle of black death.

“Were they running from something?” David asked.

“Hellbeasts,” Sazillia said. “The demons stick to the main roads and work to keep them clean of the growths. The hellbeasts—” She hissed and swatted at a large bug under her feet’s claws. “These creatures are everywhere. They will gnaw those damned souls to death, if they don’t kill themselves on the blades.” By blades, she meant the millions of sharp edges each plant had, every step in the whole damn province a risk that made the Death’s Grip tunnels and its bloodgrip vines look gentle.

“Which province is the worst?” David asked. “In all of Hell, which province is the most horrible, screwed-up place to be?”

“False Gate,” Moriah said without hesitation. “To see a mockery of the surface world in every step? To think every wall, every door, a possible escape, only to find cruel jokes and a crueler death within? I can think of little worse. Hope used as torture.”

Sazillia scoffed and gestured to the black forest beside her as she walked past. A couple of souls were in there, leaning over branches and sharp grass, skin sliced open to the bone. They’d bled to death before reaching the small path. Navameere Fields didn’t seem so bad when it’d been described to him. Seeing it in person, David had to wonder if it was the worst place of all.

“The provinces are cruel,” Laoko said. “But I wonder about the Forgotten Place most of all.”

Jeskura raised a claw. “Yeah, I wonder what it’s like there. There must be some awful shit there, right? Center of Hell. We even know if portals open there?”

“The mouth of Hell,” Tsila said, “has been seen occasionally in the black clouds over the Forgotten Place. I know of no pattern for what souls get dropped where, but I can only surmise the most cruel of souls are put there.”

David raised a finger, mirroring Jes. “Dante’s Inferno talks about the circles of Hell. Not exactly the same, but the story has nine circles of Hell, each with subcategories and stuff. The ninth circle, the middle and deepest circle, is the worst. It’s a frozen wasteland, where traitors are kept furthest from ... everything. They’re stuck, frozen, unable to do anything except suffer. In the middle, there’s Satan, trapped halfway in ice with other traitors, and he’s torturing three specific traitors for all eternity. Brutus, and uh ... Longinus, I think. Two dudes who were part of the betrayal against Julias Caesar. And, Judas, for betraying Christ.” David stared down at Pegasus’s back, eyebrows furrowed until they ached. Difficult to delve into his university brain to dig that up. A thousand lifetimes ago.

“A glimpse of our reality?” Acelina asked from the back of the group, the four Las with her. “You said the surface world is affected by the afterlife, and perhaps vice versa.”

“Maybe,” David said. “The real name for the Forgotten Place is Frozen Heart. So, I mean ... maybe damned souls with really high numbers are actually sent there, and die very, very slow deaths to freezing? Or something?”

It was a nasty image. Freezing to death on the surface world was a shitty way to go, but certainly not the worst. In Hell? It’d probably take years and be horrifically painful. He could picture it, people trapped in horrible positions, bones broken, bodies half encased in ice while hellbeasts or maybe Lucifer himself gnawed on their flesh.

Was that worse than dying from a thousand paper cuts, like here in Navameere Fields? A death here looked horrific, but it’d be over relatively quickly, compared to only God knew how long dying while frozen in the afterlife. If a soul held still and wasn’t wounded, they could supposedly lasts months, even years, without food.

The small path between the black forest and grass opened up, the landscape broken by empty sections in the shadow of enormous rocks.

And a small group of demons sat in the path, a shark-dinosaur guy, a brute, and a tiger. They were up on their feet in an instant, and charged the group, violence auras igniting like a match to gasoline. Laoko and Sazillia drew their weapons.

David opened his mouth, and closed it.

The two tetrads cut the large demons down, and David looked away. Something touched his bare leg, and he almost jumped off Pegasus. Daoka looked at him from his side, eyeless, her hand on his knee, and tilted her head as she chirped something. No translation needed.

“Better this way,” he said, and gestured to the two tetrads and the three dead demons. Quick work. Sazillia was good. “They’d probably just attack us when our guard was down.”

Daoka frowned at him, but it faded away as she stroked his leg a few more times and joined Moriah near the front.

“David,” Jes said from his other side. “You and Dao have a talk about something?”

“Yeah. She didn’t tell you?”

“Nope.” Jes shrugged, unfazed.

“It’s ... It’s nothing.”

“Not nothing, David. Whatever she told you, it’s important to her.”

Don’t become mean. Don’t become not nice. Don’t become like Greg. That’s what Dao had asked him, before Caera died.

He sighed, and the group walked on past.

---

“The fuck,” Jeskura asked, “is this?”

It was obvious what it was. A statue. A really big fucking statue forged out of black stone mixed with something bronze, growing out of the ground.

An angel, on his knees. Angel men were around seven feet tall, but the statue embellished, making the angel twice as big. No armor. Whoever the dude was, there wasn’t any way to tell if they were a gabriem, rapholem, or mikalim.

A child of the Old Ones was in the angel’s arms, dying on the ground, the statue capturing her final moments like a scene from a play, one of her hands touching the angel’s face. And considering the statue had made the angel twice as tall as reality, the child of the Old Ones was fucking massive.

David did a double-take at the statue, looking between them and Sazillia and Laoko. Whoever the long-dead woman was, she had the same flat-ish, beautiful, mask-like face as them, but four eyes, two over the other regular two. Bald, but with six giant horns. Her hands and feet didn’t just have claws, but heavy-duty claws, the kind you found on a lizard or dinosaur. No tail, though, which was a first. Demons with clawed feet always had tails, to go with their usually slightly-forward posture.

The strangest part was the six extra arms coming out of her back. Not two extra arms coming out of her sides, like Sazillia and Laoko, fujara and bolstara tetrads. This child of the Old Ones had six arms sticking out along her spine, and each ended with a solid, single, long, sharp claw, not hands.

He’d seen some children of the Old One statues like her, when they’d found clusters of the statues, but this statue spared no expense on the details. Unlike those statues, this child wasn’t naked, wearing slabs of armor on various body parts.

“She’s like ... half spider,” David said. “Sorta. A woman with spider elements? Glad again not to be an arachnophobe.”

“I’ve seen similar statues,” Sazillia said, circling it and the wide, circular base of blackstone it was perched on. “They always show this, an angel, weeping over a dying child of the Old Ones.”

“As have we,” Moriah said. “Only here, in Navameere Fields. The statues are mentioned in our books, but we have long lost the ability to read the ancient language.”

David facepalmed. “And you didn’t think that maybe I’d love to read it?”