CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HELL
Mercius fell through utter blackness and pain. His was a world of agony, from which he could not escape. He knew where he was, which gave his tormented mind a small amount of comfort. He was falling into Hell itself. He was filled not with regret, but determination; determination to suffer through all of Hell’s agonies in order to accomplish his task. Determination to give his soul, if he must, to save the one who had once saved him.
The demon half of his bloodline screamed in glorified ecstasy as the black flames through which he plummeted licked at his boiling flesh and seared into his bones. But the human in him was slowly being scoured away, and he knew that if he had to endure the evil of the obsidian flames much longer, he would surely lose his sanity, and become nothing more than the demon his father had always wanted him to be. Furthermore, he knew that this fall, painful as it was, was merely the beginning of the tortures that awaited him. This was the very outskirts of Hell; the gateway from the world of men into the darkness below.
Nephilia was dying in the recesses of Hell, and he was going in after her. Nephilia, angel that she was, had no power in the blackness of evil. She was strong, certainly, and would hold out against the torment of her captors longer than any human could, but it was only a matter of time before her life-force was snuffed out like a candle in the wind. Her nemesis and one-time sister of sorts, Mor'denaa, was nothing more than an oily slick of death in Mercius' world, where Nephilia had brought her to her end. Nephilia paid the gravest of prices, however, for destroying the demon. Now, she writhed in Hell, and Mercius went in after her.
He had no idea how long he fell. The only way he could judge the time was by his diminishing grip on sanity. He felt his mind quivering and shaking on the edge of madness. In madness, he knew, he would transform into the very thing he had sworn to destroy. Still, he fell, spinning through flame and darkness, not knowing what awaited him at the bottom of his fall.
At long last, as Mercius' mind grew ever closer to slipping over the great precipice of darkness that confronted it, he landed. The ground was hard beneath him, but it seemed to lack solidity, somehow. The contact with the floor sent a jolt of agony rippling through Mercius' joints, and for a while, he simply lay in anguish, his throat too dry and scorched to utter the whimpers of pain that demanded release. His eyelids had been melted from his face, as well as his lips and nose. He stared into the writhing blackness above him, tears and blood and pus leaking down his face and neck.
But, even as he lay on his back, he felt the demon blood running through him play its part on his flesh. Slowly, and with crawling, acid pain, the remaining patches of skin that covered his body in sparse tatters grew and knitted themselves together. His eyelids formed slowly, one wrinkle after the next, and he was finally able to blink. It hurt tremendously, but his eyes ceased their stinging. He lay prone for at least an hour, thanking whatever benign powers that could hear his prayers that he was unmolested by the demons he knew lurked in waiting.
Asgoroth, his father, was one such demon. Mercius had failed to kill him in the world above, and now he knew he would be forced to face him in Hell. It was not a battle he was looking forward to, for Asgoroth was by far the stronger above, in the world of men, and this was his domain. His powers would double in the confines of Hell, and Mercius would be hard pressed to last for even a moment against the horned beast that had sired him.
Finally, feeling strength once again flood into his limbs and heart, Mercius rose to his feet to survey his surroundings. He had often wondered what Hell would look like, and now he gazed over it in dismay.
He was standing on a massive hunk of rock, looking down into a deep valley that was cut into the harsh stone floor of Hell. There were towering spires of boiling stone jutting like fangs into the writhing sky. The sky itself was fire and blood and black hate, all liquefied and swirling together in an endless dance that made Mercius' eyes water. There was a black layer of smoke that hovered several feet above the land, and the place stank of putrescence and evil. Again, his inner beast reveled in the smell of the place and, against his human will, he began to salivate.
The scenery before him was vast, stretching into the distance beyond his sight, and filled here and there with constantly erupting volcanic mountains. Fire fell from the sky like burning oil from a lamp, and lit upon the mountains with hisses of melting rock. The heat of the place was nearly overwhelming to Mercius, even having spent his tormented childhood in a sweltering dungeon. He looked down at his arms and saw, to his utter horror, that the sweat that seeped from his pores was a mix of black and red: demon sweat.
Mercius was apalled, but he had, on some level deep in his soul, expected this. He knew that Hell was calling to the evil inside of him, and it was only a matter of time before he would transform entirely into some wicked snarling parody of a man, bent on destruction and torture and death. He prayed again, though he doubted his prayers could be heard, that he was either utterly destroyed or made it out of Hell before that transformation took place.
With this prayer floating through his head, he walked down the slope before him, into the valleys of Hell, and his doom.
Mercius was surprised to feel the comforting weight of Illuricht at his back. He had not thought that the demon blade would come with him into the ethereal realm of Hell, but it was nestled comfortably along his spine. Its song, always in Mercius' head and heart whenever he wore the thing, seemed to scream with much louder intensity; Illuricht liked Hell, and felt at home here. Mercius began to worry what would happen when he was forced to use it. Would the blade turn on him, as he had been warned it might? Would he be able to stop the thing and its bloodlust? He didn’t know, and decided that he would cross that frightening bridge when he came to it.
As he descended, he began to spot the small rodents and vermin that inhabited the outskirts of the demon world. They were twisted, creeping things, with no signs of life in their beady black eyes. They peered at him from behind jagged boulders, sniffing the air as he passed, but otherwise left him alone. They were nothing, and could sense that even he, halfling that he was, was far more powerful than they.
As he ventured deeper into the confines of Hell, he felt himself continuing to transform. It was not a physical transformation, yet, but his blood and soul were screaming out to the scorched land and the raging sulphuric fire that surrounded him. Just to be sure that he still could, he reached deep inside himself and felt for the power of the Arka. It was there, strong as ever: a deep well inside of him that longed for release. There was a note to it, however, that was new. It seemed to sing inside of him with a slightly different tone. Mercius could only imagine that it was somehow affected by the evil of Hell. It was not a comforting thought.
Mercius walked for hours and hours, deeper into the abyss of Hell. He was weary and exhausted, but at the same time, he felt a strength seeping through him. He didn’t enjoy this strength that seemed to defy his physical being. He knew that it was Hell’s influence on his partially demonic body, and the thought sent an eerie shudder up his spine.
Slowly, the landscape around him changed. The boulders that he had been skirting through as he descended into the valley became taller and more densely placed, until he was walking through a darkened tunnel, with only a thin sliver of bleeding sky visible high above him. Having grown up in the dungeons, he was familiar with the tightening knot of claustrophobia in his belly: he was used to the closeness of sweating black stone and, against his will, he took a small amount of comfort in it. He ran his fingers along the giant walls through which he walked and could touch on either side by simply extending his arms to their fullest, and recoiled slightly at the hissing burning that immediately singed the pads of his fingers. He wasn’t sure if the rocks were hot, or if they were simply exuding some kind of acid that scorched his flesh.
Suddenly, even as he was drawing back his hands from the walls that surroun
ded him, there was a deafening boom, and thick black metal spikes hurtled out through the rocks on either side of him. Lightning quick, Mercius dove to the ground and was just able to avoid being impaled through his skull. From his belly, he turned and looked over his shoulder at the weapons that had nearly killed him. They were wickedly dark and sharp, but there was no other sign indicating where they had come from. The walls seemed to know that he was there, and were trying to destroy him. Hell itself was trying to destroy him; to turn him from his self-appointed task.
Regaining his feet, Mercius continued his march through the high tunnel of darkness, now extremely wary of his surroundings, and ready for anything. His nerves were tattered and skittering, but he fought them for control, and managed to win out over their jittering instability. He walked slowly and with purpose, putting as much confidence into his strides as he could muster. He was frightened to his marrow, as Hell will do to anything, demon or human, but this too he fought. His fear was his fuel, as was his rage and his hate. Nephilia had done nothing to deserve torturous death. This is what he believed, and was prepared to give his life, even his soul, to defend that.
The tunnel was nearly pitch black, and even his demonic sight could hardly pierce the darkness. He could see several yards in front of his face, but he would have very little warning if something came rushing at him through the tiny canyon.
Then came the demons. He heard their snarling approach over the hissing and roaring of the flames of Hell that were everywhere and nowhere. They came like wildfire both from in front and behind him.
Drawing Illuricht, he spoke softly to it before the monsters closed with him: “Do not betray me, I beg you.” He knew it was foolish, talking to his sword, but the thing seemed to quiver ever so slightly in his grasp as he spoke. The next second, they were on him. He fought with all the skills he possessed, but these demons were faster, stronger, smarter than any he had encountered before. As he swung his blade and spun with lightning speed and grace, he prayed silently that Hell had sent its best against him already, and that these were the most fierce opponents he would have to face. He seriously doubted it.
The hissing demons carried no weapons. Instead, they fought with fangs and claws and gnashing razor teeth. They were quick, but Mercius was ever so slightly faster. He spun and danced between stances as he slashed and jabbed with his demon blade. At the first drop of blood that Illuricht tasted, it seemed to shiver violently in his grasp. He knew instinctively that it would not choose this particular moment to betray him. It was faithful, for now, and Mercius was able to use it to his fullest, killing nearly a dozen rushing, snarling demons in a matter of moments. But its loyalty was a perilous thing in this place.
When the last demon crumpled before him with its head nearly sliced off, he stood panting, and even more exhausted than he had been before their attack. He looked down on the crumpled bodies of the twisted creatures, and even as he gazed at them, they burst into flames suddenly; flames that wailed with ecstasy and misery. As he watched, the remains of his foes melted slowly away, and bled with smoke and steam into the very rocks that surrounded the carnage. Mercius backed away, and, taking a deep breath, turned and resumed his journey through Hell. It was the first trial that had been sent against him, and he was sure that it would not be the last, nor the fiercest.
For days he walked. He was assaulted occasionally by demons of the ugliest sort. They were all much faster and stronger and smarter than the ones he had encountered in the world of men, being in their own element in Hell, and pulling from the very air the power that it held within. Also the walls of the tunnel through which he walked sent out their deadly traps. Steels spikes barreling through the walls toward his head were the most common, but there were others as well: deep pits covered by some dark magic that made them nearly invisible, giant falling stones set ablaze that he had to dive away from in order to avoid being crushed under their burning masses, swarms of insects the size of his fist, stinging and biting and trying to burrow into his flesh.
He avoided these obstacles as best he could, but he was bloody and slowly losing strength and vitality. But there was still the demon in him that was growing, slowly and nearly imperceptibly. That part of him raged in fiery freedom, but Mercius was able to keep it at bay.
He found that he had no need for food or sleep in this place, which was a blessing because there was no sustenance to be had, and if he stopped for even a moment his relentless march, he knew, he would be crushed and killed and devoured instantly.
The worst part of his slow and seemingly endless journey through Hell was the utter despair that gripped his soul. He had grown up in a place as close to Hell as was possible, true, but he had, for the last decade, considered himself a creature of light and love. The overwhelming intensity of Hell was wearing on his sanity and reason, wearing on his hope, breaking slowly his soul. He kept his mind focused as much as he possibly could on Keira.
He would spend hours thinking of the color of her eyes or the smell of her skin. He pictured in his head the look of her face and heard the sweet sound of her laughter. He felt her skin brushing up against his, and tasted her sex and her kiss. She was his love, his life, and he began to wonder why he had ever left her for this foolish journey into the darkness. Then, inevitably, his thoughts would jump to Nephilia. She, of course, was the reason he was here. His conviction would return, and he would find deep within himself a well of energy from which to draw, forcing himself to continue marching through the darkened tunnel of Hell. Nephilia, angel that she was, stood for all that Mercius held to be beautiful and lovely. She stood for the light; for the happiness and love that the world had once known. She stood for what could be, and what had been. If she could not be rescued from this twisted, distorted, ugly darkened place, then there was no reason for Mercius to continue his fight. He had to save her, or die trying.
This thought would lead him, inevitably, to whether or not he could die here, or if he would simply be put through endless torture for the rest of eternity. To distract himself from this unanswerable question, Mercius would think of Keira. And thus the cycle of his tormented thoughts would start anew.
Mercius didn’t know how long he had marched, for there was no time in Hell. There was no night, and no day, only perpetual darkness and stench. His sanity was slipping in this eternity in which everything was the same and no progress could be detected. He felt his mind slowly sliding out of his control, as his thoughts no longer always went where directed. When would this end? The attacks and assaults on him were not getting any more frequent or fierce. The demons that attacked him were of the same caliber. The walls still burned to the touch. The visible sliver of sky above him was still a roiling mass of black and blood and evil.
It was with maddening slowness that Mercius perceived the walls that enclosed him on either side coming slowly together; encroaching on him with a creeping steadiness. The knot of claustrophobia in his gut tightened until his abdomen quivered uncontrollably and his head developed an agonized, squeezing ache.
He was more frightened than he could ever remember being. He was finally coming to some sort of crossroads, he knew; his journey through Hell coming to some real confrontation at last. The walls continued to tighten on him, from above now as well, until he was forced to walk hunched over, and, finally, crawl on all fours. The only fortunate part about this torturous crawl was the fact that the demon assaults ceased entirely. He got the pervading sense, somehow, that he was being tested in stages. The first stage had been his plummeting descent through the black flames of the pit that led into Hell. He had survived, and had then been assaulted by the obstacles thrown at him throughout this close tunnel. Now, he would have to come to his next confrontation on all fours, like a beaten dog.
The demon inside him raged and screamed and howled. Mercius was unable to quench its lust and glory, but did not entirely give in to the urge to allow his other h
alf to fully take over. He would fight!
With this thought, and the conviction that he put into it, the walls around him and crouching down atop him suddenly opened up. Mercius blinked and got to his feet.
The place before him was vast and dark. But Mercius could see by the light of large fires placed all around in random places on the black stone floor. It wasn’t a chamber, this, simply a vast expanse of semi-nothingness. He gazed at each of the towering fire pillars in turn, and saw, to his horror, that in each of the blazes, there were countless souls being roasted and scorched, screaming their endless agonies. No demons attended these flames; they simply were, and their inhabitants were always there imprisoned. The air about the place writhed with the screams of the tortured, and a stagnant, repulsive odor nearly took Mercius' breath away.
He approached the column of flame closest to him, and could see the scorched souls spinning and plummeting and rising through the fire in an endless dance of macabre misery. Feeling for the prisoners, Mercius stretched out a hand and reached into the flame, hoping to touch one of them; to free them. He brought his hand back quickly with a sharp intake of breath, and gazed at his hand. Though he had only had it in there for the briefest of moments, the flesh had been melted entirely from his fingers, leaving only charred bone. As he peered at his ruined hand, the demon-blood in him again worked its dark magic, this time more quickly. The flesh on his hand regrew itself with stunning speed, and the pain subsided entirely. This brought a new twinge of fear at what he was slowly but certainly becoming. He was running out of time, before he knew no longer who he was or what was his purpose.
With this thought in his mind, Mercius ran through the emptiness of the place, skirting the fires that dotted the landscape like the signs of plague. The screaming wails of the condemned were his only company aside from the pounding beat of his heart, and his fear.
After an eternity of fleeting moments through which Mercius ran with wild abandon, the dark emptiness lessened and the cleansing flames grew more sparse.
Mercius was suddenly faced by a towering slope of charred rock. He stopped and peered up the daunting face of this mountainous monolith. Its top was lost beyond sight and shrouded with the perpetual blackness that reigned over Hell. He could see, however, that it was in fact a tower, becoming more and more slender as it climbed into the burning acrid sky.
With a quick, instinctive decision, Mercius decided not to circumvent the tower, for he knew that he would only find more blackness surrounding it. No, he must climb this slope, and face whatever doom there awaited him.
The ascent started with little difficulty, being not much more than slightly sloping rock. But it quickly turned into a nightmare climb, the rocks becoming more jagged and hot to the touch, the incline turning into a near vertical. Furthermore, a burning rain of blood and acid began to fall. Aside from making the hand- and foot-holds incredibly slippery and nearly impossible to manage, the blood-acid-rain burnt into his naked flesh. He cried out in miserable agony as the flesh that covered his bones melted away, only to be regrown by the beast that was slowly taking over his body, before melting away again. It was an endless cycle of torment that he knew was sent by Hell itself to test his resolve. With gritted teeth and a tormented cry of pain perpetually escaping from his dry throat, Mercius climbed on.
This agony lasted for what he could only figure as days during which he felt the beast within him gaining an ever firmer hold on his soul and his mind. He was losing his humanity with every tortured scream that emanated from his mouth, and he was losing the will to hold on to what little he had left.
As before, Mercius forced images into his mind of his love, Keira, and his purpose in this ghastly place, Nephilia. But, no matter how he tried to stop it, the images inevitably turned from the beauty he knew and loved, to tortured pictures of agony and debauchery. He would hold Keira's face in his mind’s eye, but it would be replaced, against his weakening will, with images of her brutalized and bleeding, with her skin flayed from her bones or burnt from her body. Nephilia’s glorious image would be distorted into a parody of her head, with the eyes ripped out and wearing a crown of broken glass, torn from her body and placed on a spike, or sewn onto some multi-legged beast of fur and scales. The nightmare continued to play its ugly scenes through his head, and he was powerless to stop it. Hell was slowly eating his soul.