The Pleasures of Hell

~~Day 123~~

~~David~~

Back on the march and a week away from the spire. Sazillia insisted it'd be an easy walk with her to dissuade any demons from thinking him an easy meal. And nearby Cainites. And nearby hellbeasts. So far, she was right.

The bailiff's army stayed a fair distance away but circled the crew. 'For protection', Sazillia insisted. She walked in front of David's crew with Laoko and Moriah, while the other girls stayed near David and behind him.

David peeked back. The gabriem Tsila was talking with Caera about something, nodding, until Caera walked up to David and looked up at him, the tiger walking on all fours.

"David," she said.

"Yeah?"

"You want a ride?"

He laughed. "You sure you want to carry me?"

"You weigh less than a suit of meera metal." She gestured to the few pieces of black metal she wore.

"We're still days away," he said. "I know demons hate walking."

"And yet!" Caera matched his laugh and thudded the ground with her thick tail. Pegasus clopped after it. "We walk everywhere."

"Once we save the Great Tower," he said, "we can stop the civil war in Heaven, and then the angels will fly us everywhere."

Moriah looked back long enough to squint, and laugh.

Caera shrugged up at him and nudged her shoulder into his hip. "If you're sure."

"I'm fine walking. But I do wanna know what you were talking with Tsila about."

"You."

He winced. "Oh?"

"Yeah." Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she pressed against his hip again. "You really tore into Sazillia before."

Oh. This conversation. It was bound to happen.

"She said people on the surface were weak."

Caera shrugged. "So? A demon insulting humans. Seems pretty innocent."

He took a deep breath. It wasn't Caera's fault she didn't know how much this topic grated on his soul. He'd never told her. But the thought alone had bile -- or some Hell equivalent -- boiling in his gut, and he closed his eyes. Tell her? Tell her.

"One time," he whispered, "I had to attend a funeral. My sister and I were orphans, and we never stayed with any family for long. Never connected with them. Never connected with anyone, really. Our guardians at the time, a married couple, had it rough. They were trying to be good parents to us, but--shit." Eyes still closed, he stumbled on a rock. "That offer for a ride still open?"

Caera smiled and lowered her back, arching it, and he climbed aboard. It took a bit to find the groove to sit on just below her shoulders and between two big spikes, and even then, one spike's base was up against his junk, and another was up the crack of his ass. Not good for riding, and he didn't plan to for long. Just long enough to talk.

"I wasn't lying," he continued, "or exaggerating, when I described what life is like for people on the surface. My guardians just kept getting screwed over and over, losing their jobs, getting replaced by automation, getting..." He shook his head. No point in explaining the finer details to a demon, but Caera would believe him if he just said it was bad. "It was bad."

"I can't wrap my mind around a life like that," Caera said. "I doubt any demon can."

"Just remember what I said before, and then... imagine what happens when you finally do snap. Imagine you just give up."

"Give up?"

"You stop fighting." He leaned over her, his palms on her tiger shoulders. "You realize you can't get a job anymore and you're going to lose your house, and those kids you've been trying and failing to connect with will get taken away from you. You just give up."

Caera tilted her head and looked up at him with her single eye. "What happened?"

"It wasn't just our guardians having trouble. Tom's sister, Jenny, she... she was in a car accident. She died." He shook his head. "That was the snapping point. Tom and Margie fell apart at the funeral. There was crying, and screaming, and... and they yelled at me. I was ten. And they yelled at me like it was my fault." Saying it out loud made it sound a thousand times less serious, and he laughed. "I know that doesn't sound like it means much. Demons grow up in a hatching pit, killing each other to survive. But to a kid, seeing a parent break down, screaming, crying, and tearing into you because they just need some kind of outlet? For just a second, Tom was convinced I was the reason his life was falling apart.

"Mia and I were sent back to an orphanage after that, and put with new guardians the next year. But I never forgot the look in Tom's eyes. A few years later, I looked Tom up. He'd killed himself. I don't know what happened to Margie. I think she moved in with family. But..." Every word tasted bitter, and he made sure only Caera could hear him. "I don't blame Tom for blaming me. Not because I agree with him--I don't. But I'd have probably done the same thing, just snap like that. And ever since then, I guess I've... I've understood how hard life can be for adults, you know? Know it, understand it, even at my age. Fuck me, I was, and still am young, but seeing what happened to Tom made me understand.

"I know Mia says she wants to be a psychiatrist because she wants to be a couples therapist. She's all into helping people get along, especially romantically. But she saw the whole thing: how Margie and Tom yelled at me more than her. I... shut down, during and after the funeral, and it was weeks before I could even talk again. Mia was just a kid, too, but she helped me understand what happened. I bet that's a driving force behind her job choice, too." He leaned back and let the anchor off his neck. "I miss her."

Caera looked up at him, staring, face unreadable. The gap to understand was just too wide, and he shrugged down at her and patted her back.

"Mia would explain it better," he said. "She'd go on about child psychology and how it affects you growing up. Formative years. How affecting a child's neurological growth causes massive, life-lasting, deep changes in how a person thinks for the rest of their life, etcetera, etcetera. I guess I'm an example of that. But it sounds so minor, so... irrelevant, compared to a single day in Hell. I haven't been talking about it, because, yeah, it was a big deal to me, but--"

"It's not irrelevant," Caera said. "It's not. I don't understand it. I can't. But demons and angels know one thing about souls: the Great Tower was made for you, not for us. Whatever it is on the surface you feel, all that... that stuff, that's why we're here, right?"

David shook his head. "I don't know. I can't say that demons and angels are less important than souls."

"I can. We are."

And that was that. Caera looked ahead, marched along, and David held on as he let his feet recover. He looked back, and from Tatiana's side, Tsila smiled at him.

That damn angel had planned this. Probably thought all he needed was a nudge, and he'd talk about his past. He'd fallen for it, too. He squinted at her, and she finger-waved.

"Why're you talking with Tsila about me?" he asked the tiger between his legs.

"Why not? I wanted to know what you were upset about. Now I know a little more about you." She shrugged and gave her tail a wag. "Think we'll find any interesting runes in the old tongue? I know we don't really have time to go crawling through ruins and tunnels looking for more interesting things, but after seeing Azazel and the statues of the children fighting, and that plaque? I bet we'll find more stuff!"

He laughed again. A direct question like 'why were you talking about me' would make anyone else defensive. Not demons. Not Caera.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~Day 129~~

Another week of walking, and Hell had more twists for them. Much as the province was mostly flat, flatness was subjective. Each province was hundreds of kilometers long and took a month to walk across. Small dips in the ground opened up into wide craters, filled with remnants that screamed and churned into a blender. Anthills dotted the ground, and they only grew bigger the closer the crew got to the center of the province, some towering over the crew as they subtly popped remnants within and leaked their contents, like squashing grapes.

The ground turned flat, and a million faces poked out from it, just enough to expose the mouth, nose, and eyes of the remnants. Their fingers stuck up, the ground hiding their hands so only the digits themselves were free. They could grab nothing. They could bite nothing. And hellbeasts took their sweet time killing them.

The spire was in the distance, half a day's walk away, but it looked like every other spire, a colossal, skinny thing of spiky black metal and circular balconies, and the damn thing was probably filled with red flesh, too. But the field of remnant faces that surrounded the spire was infinitely more interesting, and horrific.

"What," David asked, "are those?" His finger pointed at the ant-like creatures munching on the literal million faces on the ground.

"Mandals," Sazillia said. "Souls call them fire ants."

They were ants, that was true. Red, too, but that was to be expected from hellbeasts, always a mix of black and red like demons. Unlike red ants, they were a foot long, and spiky. Like ants, they swarmed, and at least ten thousand of the red swarm crawled over the faces and munched on them, cutting off fingers and digging holes into skulls with their mandibles. A flowing red river of moving bodies, casually moving through fields of screaming remnants that might as well have been flesh grass. The ant river turned, thousands upon thousands of little ant legs guiding the flowing current of hellbeasts to fresh new crops to nibble on.

"I have to say," David said, "I thought the Red Pits wouldn't be as horrific as the other provinces. Hearing that the demons here are organized into a military made me think the terrain wouldn't be so awful. But this province is fucked up. This!" He gestured at the closest ant, maybe fifty meters off, casually biting off the fingers of a crying remnant. "This is fucked up. I thought maybe it'd be giant hellbeasts that you had to fight off regularly."

The bailiff tetrad shook her head. "Of course not. We have the Navameere Fields to hone our teeth and power. There are deadly hellbeasts in the Red Pits, but no. We aren't--what was the word? Darwinian."

"Right, right." Sighing, he gestured ahead. "Okay, so... how do we get to the spire?"

"We walk." Sazillia shrugged and started walking. The ants dispersed, the curving river turning away, leaving dead remnants in their wake. But more remnants grew up from underneath and around the dead, and the screams resumed. Infinite growing flesh grass.

David looked down and did his best to avoid stepping on any faces or fingers. Crunch. Crack. He stopped.

"Okay, I uh... A little help?" Fuck worrying about looking weak, he didn't care. This was too much.

Caera came up beside him, and he climbed onto her back without hesitation. Some nearby demons laughed, and he didn't so much as give them an evil glare. Let them laugh. This place was messed up.

Sazillia's battalion walked ahead, killing remnants as they walked, but new ones grew in quickly. Each step was walking either on a pile of gore, or a newly grown remnant's fingers or face. David looked down, regretted immediately, and did it again anyway. Numbers carved into foreheads blurred together, and desperate eyes stared up at him.

If he saved the Great Tower someday, he'd fix this. He'd find a way to make Hell a better system, instead of this... ecosystem of brutality.

Make a better system than God? Well, God wasn't around, so, yes.

The closer they grew to the tower, the more familiar things got. Black spikes jutted up from the ground with the curve of rib bones, and many held a black skull from a chain with fire burning inside. Imps and grems perched on them, as did gargoyles, and they watched with wide eyes as Sazillia's little army spread apart, allowing Sazillia, David, and the crew to approach the tower. Thankfully, the field of flesh stopped as they approached, and regular black and brown dirt awaited them.

In front of the spire, the cavernous opening awaited, blocked off by a dozen brutes wearing aera metal and wielding an enormous aera sword, held in front of them, point down.

David froze. Aera armor. It was beautiful, bronze and red, with edges highlighted in gold. And brutes were so much bigger than the rider, always naked, never wearing armor or wielding a weapon. But these were.

"Uh... that's aera armor," David said.

Moriah and Tsila stood at Caera's sides, both grimacing and clenching their teeth.

"Of course," Sazillia said. "I wore it, when I defended the border. And I will wear it again." The tetrad grinned down at him and ran her fingers through her short dreadlocks. "When I take your head to Khazeer, surely he will grant me my armaments again."

David hopped off Caera's back and--

Sazillia put up her four hands, empty. "Kidding, unmarked." Laughing as if she could've been waving a glass of ale around and recounting old tales of fighting monsters, she gestured to the dozen brutes. "Khazeer's elite guard. He saw us coming. Come." She walked toward the spire, leaving her army behind.

Caera looked up at David. "I don't know if I should laugh or bite her."

"Me neither," Laoko said. "Come." She followed her fellow tetrad.

"Pegasus," David said. "Stay close."

Caera clucked once, and Pegasus pulled up to David's side. Nearby demons stared, unsure of whom to stare at more: the two angels wrapped in red silks, the spire mother outside her spire, the goort with wings, or the human boy in the center of it all. But once they realized what he was, all eyes locked on him.

"Sazillia," David said. "I'm not going to attack, so don't freak out."

"Freak out? What--" The tetrad spun, but stepped back as David summoned his armor and staff.

The crowd stared on, and a thousand demons gasped -- more like snarled, really -- as a red puff of light covered David. He held out his hand, and a black staff filled his grip. Black armor covered him from neck to toe, with red silk dangling from between the joints of the spiky metal suit. Batlam rune gave him a crown, too, black and lined with spikes and red jewels.

Sazillia stared at him as he stepped past her and walked up to the dozen brutes. A brute in meera metal was scary enough, but in aera metal and wielding aera swords? Thankfully, they only wore a few pieces of it: a breastplate, and pieces on the forearms and thighs; otherwise, he might not have approached at all.

But this was Hell. He had to look strong.

He led the group up to the blockade of elite guards and tapped the ground with his staff.

"I am David," he said. "Unmarked. I'm passing through this province, and I must speak with Khazeer. Step aside."

The brutes looked at each other, their first signs of life. But they said nothing, hands resting on their sword grips.

In any other universe, David would be juggling a thousand concerns about diplomacy. Not anymore. The demons wanted direct, aggressive, and he could do that.

"Did I stutter?" David asked. "I said, step aside." He held out his staff to his side and slammed the base into the ground. A small hellquake rumbled through the ground, and a dozen black spikes erupted from the dirt, each as tall as him. With a silent tune, he let the spikes go, and they crumbled into dirt back onto the ground.

Showing off. Pure ego boasting. It was the sort of shit that made him roll his eyes whenever he'd seen guys do it on the surface. Like gorillas thudding their chests. But in a world of literal predators, it worked wonders, and the dozen brutes stared at him with a mix of respect and trepidation.

"Or," a voice behind them said, "I come down and see you myself."

The twelve brutes stepped aside and revealed the source of the voice.

No introductions needed. Khazeer. A korgejin tetrad. Hooves, no tail, and four colossal horns on his bald head. Two enormous wings spread out as he walked forward, with each wing finger pierced with black chains that held dangling demon skulls.

His armor was terrifying. He didn't wear just a few pieces of aera armor, but a full suit of it that covered nearly every inch of him. The only pieces he didn't wear were a helmet and boots, what with giant horns and hooves. But every other part was wrapped in bronze, red, and gold armor, making each step he took clink quietly as he moved into the enormous archway entrance of the spire. Skulls rattled, dangling from leather strips on his waist, like some Hollywood Roman legionnaire's skirt, demon skulls of all shapes and sizes to match the skulls on his wings.

Like all korgejins, he had a very skull-ish demon face, barely any lips at all so his sharp teeth were always exposed. A long, straight scar cut across his face, between the eyes and down to the corner of his jaw, as if to perfectly match his narrow head.

He wielded two axes. Aera metal, of course. For a moment, David prepared to see glowing blades, ready to chop into flesh and unleash hellfire. But no, they were just metal.

David didn't back up, and stood in the opening lip of the archway as Khazeer came closer. Sazillia stood to the side out of the way, but Laoko, Tsila, and Moriah stood directly beside him, and Caera and Jes directly behind him.

"Hi," David said with the most casual tone he could muster. Khazeer blinked. Good. "I'm David. I'm going to deal with the unmarked girl attacking the Red Pits with Morgana's armies. And you're going to help."

Khazeer looked at him, axes in hand. The body language seemed fine, but from the calm look on the demon's face, Khazeer was the sort of man who could get deadly violent without wearing his intent on his sleeve.

"Am I?" he asked.

"Yes. But I'm not here to bully you into obedience, Khazeer." He gestured back to Tatiana, and the naked, slim succubus stepped out from her small group and joined him. "I'm looking for an ally."

Khazeer slowly shifted his gaze between the succubus and him, back and forth, scanning. He stood up straight, sheathed his axes onto small hooks in the armor on his hips, and squatted down in front of the succubus. Tatiana was damn tall at seven feet, but Khazeer was over ten.

"You come from the Scar for this unmarked?" he asked her. "You've even abandoned your garb."

Tatiana sighed and gestured to the angels. "We had to hide their damn white wings. And besides, I look good naked." To prove it, she did a slow spin. Yeap, she looked very good, with small black piercings piercing... all the good stuff. "I was ordered to come here, if you must know, by the new spire ruler of the Scar. But that doesn't mean I didn't want to see you again."

Khazeer half grinned, half sneered. Not the response David expected. Whatever history these two had, it wasn't simple.

"The spire ruler of the Scar," Khazeer said, looking at David again. "Is not you?"

"It is me," David said. "But I doubt I can go through the ceremony to become a new spire ruler. That ritual looked specifically for demons."

The korgejin nodded and tapped the small amber horn jutting from his forehead. "So you picked a bailiff to rule in your stead. Why not Tatiana?"

"I hadn't met Tatiana at the time. But I had met Septima, and I trust her. Now that I've met Tatiana, I trust her as far as I can throw her." David gestured at himself with his free hand. "I can destroy mountains with a wave of my hand, but with my muscles? I can't lift shit."

Mia would have called that sort of comment disarming, a way to test the waters and see how the opponent reacted.

Khazeer smiled. Barely, but he did. Test successful? The smile turned into a chuckle, and he nodded as he stood up.

"I don't trust the succubus either," Khazeer said. Tatiana snarled up at the man, but snarl turned into squeak when he picked her up, and literally put the naked woman on his shoulder. "Come. We will speak in my throne room."