The great circular chasm of blue flames blazed miles high, stretching from the base of the gates, encircling the savage, scorching black pitch plains of Perdition.
Lucifer, magnificently attired in his ceremonial regalia, reclined on his black diamond throne, which was carried on the shoulders of twelve satanic princes. His gleaming raven hair, intricately plaited with flaming jewels, fell past his shoulders to his glistening satin garments. On his head rested his crown of state of pure gold embedded with chrysolite and black rubies. A glistening white cloak hemmed with ermine was draped across his shoulders, and his sandals were of freshly molten gold. He held hell’s sceptre in his left hand.
The king of hell. Followed by thousands of his menacing satanic warrior princes, who in turn were led by the ghoulish company of hooded Shaman Kings, hell’s macabre drummers. The legion of Necromancers, wizards of the dead, marched near the gates, their great armies of skeletons and zombies filling the plains.
Charsoc walked below Lucifer, next to the procession, his hat and cloak now exchanged for his favoured bright vermillion and orange striped flowing robes of Chief Magus. His sorcerer’s hat was pointed, its tip and rim of platinum. His scarlet shoes were long and narrow and curved upwards at the toe with diamond buckles that changed colour with each new dark incantation. Charsoc held his crooked magus rod high. Live serpents writhed from under the folds of his robes onto the burning pitch below.
Ahead of both Lucifer and Charsoc, in advance of the fiendish parade, swaggered the leering Moloch and his horde of strapping demonic butchers, to the ominous rhythm of hell’s pulsating war drums.
Jesus, manacled and bound, clad only in the bloody loincloth in which He was crucified, was raised high on the massive oiled shoulders of ten of Moloch’s most depraved slayers. They marched directly in front of Lucifer.
The Nazarene – hell’s trophy.
As the demonic armies approached the gates, the skies grew black with thousands of screeching banshees. They hovered overhead, hissing asps flowing from their bare skulls, their wings beating furiously as the riotous hellish army continued its march to the slow mutinous rhythm of hell’s throbbing war drums.
The ‘Ring of Fire’ flamed ferociously. Hundreds of the seraph monsters left their nests and swooped down across the gates, their nostrils flaming, smelling the intruder. Their jagged claws slashed, hovering menacingly over the manacled Jesus.
A great shuddering drew nearer as a band of Shaman-Ogres lumbered towards the entrance, then peered through the iron bars, their squat yellow eyes glinting in the semi-darkness.
‘We are the keepers of the Gates of Hell and the grave,’ a voice rumbled.
‘We await you and your trophy, O Satan, king of hell,’ Ruber, leader of the Shaman-Ogres growled through the iron bars, leering at Jesus. The war drums stopped, and a heavy silence fell, broken only by the vicious snarling of the five-headed sentry hellhounds.
Twenty of the Luciferean Black Horde, led by Dagon, marched forward out of the darkness. Carried high on their shoulders was a huge black casket. ‘We present the keys of hell,’ Dagon roared.
The Black Guard placed the casket down before the gate and bowed deeply to Lucifer.
Dagon unlocked the casket and opened it.
Lying on a bed of magenta velvet was an enormous golden key, engraved with angelic lettering, a ruby embedded in its crown.
Dagon nodded to his militia, and six of them hoisted the key up onto their shoulders and marched over to where Ruber stood, waiting in front of the lock.
Ruber held out his huge leathery hand, lifted the master key upward, and placed it in the lock, then turned it. The sound of a hundred monstrous locks of hell unbolting resounded through the lava plains.
‘Welcome to your domain, master. Hell and the underworld await you.’
A hundred Shaman-Ogres heaved the iron monstrosity back. Slowly the mammoth gateway opened, the entrance into the molten core of the earth. The underworld of departed spirits. Fiery blue tempests howled through the gates while molten lava rain lashed down on the procession as it passed through. Balberith waited next to Lucifer’s magnificent dark-winged royal stallion, tethered inside the gates.
Ahead loomed a raised road of crystal ore, with seething pitch glowing red beneath it. The road became a fluid glass passageway that fell away on both sides into a blasting chasm of molten iron ore that stretched thousands of miles below into the very bowels of the earth. This was the Crystal Corridor of the underworld, some three thousand miles below the surface and some fifteen hundred miles across – earth’s inner core.
Ahead, glistening through the crystal core, a league in the distance, stood the Black Palace – Lucifer’s imposing palace of black crystal. Inside the palace citadel, resting beyond the magenta veil in the black necropolis, lay the ‘Ark of the Race of Men’, guarded by the satanic warriors of Lucifer’s Black Horde, his elite militia.
To the left of the corridor, through the transparent liquid crystal walls, loomed hell’s monstrous penitentiaries, which incarcerated the wicked dead.
Millions of penitentiaries housing Lucifer’s penal colonies were hewn out of the jagged iron cliffs, which stretched steeply upward thousands of feet and plummeted thousands of feet downward – the labour camps of the damned.
A thunderous malicious caterwauling rose from behind the iron bars – the tormented screams of millions of the wicked dead from the Race of Men, mingled with the cackling roar of hell’s prison warders, the wort devourers and banshees that lined the corridor to Perdition, shrieking their incantations of the damned. To the right of the corridor, beyond a great gulf, lay the strange, gloomy shadowlands, the abode of the slumbering Righteous dead. The Grave.
It was one monstrous sheer block of translucent crystal that stretched thousands of miles above the corridor and fell thousands of miles beneath.
The twelve satanic princes laid Lucifer and his throne onto the ground. Lucifer rose. He turned, surveying Jesus, lifted high on the arms of Moloch’s Philistine horde as they marched through the tempests and molten rain towards him. He raised his arm. ‘Deliver the Nazarene to the underworld!’ he cried, then pulled his cape tighter around him and mounted his stallion. Its black veined wings extended, and they flew ahead, straight into the raging tempests.
Instantly the party was sucked downward until the grey shadows of hell dimmed to the oppressive pitch blackness of the lower crystal road, lit only by the flickering lanterns of the wort devourers.
* * *
‘On the left, Nazarene...’ Lucifer smiled viciously as Moloch roughly pushed Jesus’ head to the left, ‘...the rabble of the Race of Men who reject Yehovah – blasphemers, murderers, rebels...’
Screaming men and women, their eyes veiled with grimy opaque film, clawed blindly at the iron penitentiary walls, their lower bodies burning alive in the seething black lava.
‘And now the crème de la crème of the Race of Men – the intellectuals...’ Lucifer turned disdainfully towards the chain fences where a group of prisoners screamed in torment, clawing wildly, the fingers of their spirit bodies torn and bleeding, their nails ripped from clawing the jagged barbed barrier.
‘Atheists, philosophers, agnostics – all rejecting the existence of a personal creator. Their god was their own minds and opinions. They scream the most volubly when they arrive in my domain and discover that I was real.’ Lucifer smiled. ‘When they realize that Yehovah exists,’ he shrugged, ‘they are driven out of their minds and beg for death.’ Lucifer raised his hand. ‘Release the hell bulls into the penitentiary, Adzeal.’
A hundred raging snarling hell bulls, each weighing two thousand pounds, pawed the lava with their horn hooves, then charged the damned prisoners, their curved horns goring their bodies, throwing them onto a pile of writhing screaming prisoners in the corner of the burning black pitch.
‘But then, this is hell. There is no death, only torments ... And now, Nazarene, my prized ones...’
Moloch grabbed Jesus by
the hair and swung His head violently to the right, beyond the great chasm. There was complete silence in the strange black gloom of the shadow lands. ‘My Master’s shadowed realm,’ Moloch growled.
Gradually, the black faded to a great grey darkness.
Lucifer’s voice dropped to a low, intimate tone. ‘The grave,’ he whispered in awe.
They rode slowly past the brazen gates of the monstrous great crystal barricades of the underworld – the dim outlines of the millions of men and women incarcerated in the murky ice lay as if in some strange slumbering limbo.
‘They are all who have fallen asleep since the beginning of the world,’ Charsoc whispered to Jesus. ‘All who worshipped Yehovah, Nazarene.’
‘They sleep the slumber of the righteous dead,’ Lucifer hissed, ‘Never to awaken in my domain.’
They passed thousands more of the floating slumbering bodies frozen into the sheer block of ice. Almost godlike in stature, even in their slumber, it was obvious that they were nearly seven feet tall, with angelic features and an unearthly glowing radiance that still issued from their bodies.
‘Souls from the times of Adam,’ gloated Charsoc. ‘The glory of the Race of Men has diminished through the centuries – a consequence of the fall.’
‘The glory of Perdition,’ Lucifer crowed. ‘His prophets, patriarchs, all who belong to Yehovah ... who belong to You, Nazarene – all under my jurisdiction. And when my time is up, according to my claim lodged in the councils of the First Heaven, each of them shall join me in the Lake of Fire.’
* * *
Over a hundred million of the First Heaven’s angelic warriors assembled on the sprawling bleak plains of Perdition, outside the Gates of Hell. Their armies stretched to the horizon in every direction.
Ahead of the vast angelic legions, positioned directly in front of the monstrous iron gates, rode Jether and the twenty-three ancient heavenly kings, mounted in a semicircle on their winged white chargers. Imperial and forbidding. Their lances flashed with the lightnings of Yehovah and were upraised in their right hands. In their left they held high the blazing crimson standards with the sign of the cross.
On either side of them marched the heralds, the ‘Proclaimers’, blowing their shofars, with the banners of the First Heaven lifted high. Following them came ten thousand Great White Knights, their battering-rams at the ready.
Directly behind them, led by Gabriel attired in full battle regalia, marched his vast company of swift and agile archers, the Revelators, in suits of gleaming silver armour.
Overhead flew a million of the Revelator scouts, filling the length and breadth of the skies – the First Heaven’s huge white-feathered warrior eagles. Around each eagle’s neck was a circlet of gold embedded with rubies: the warriors’ homing beacons.
Filling the plain to Gabriel’s right thundered Michael’s imperial knights mounted on their gold-caparisoned war stallions. Their gleaming broadswords were raised high, following the mighty commander of heaven’s armies.
Michael rode bareback on his enormous black war stallion, covered from head to toe in his ceremonial golden armour, the Sword of State raised high in his right hand.
Escorting him and his armies were the immense company of the White Winged Lions of Yehovah, their white manes glistening, their enormous white wings extended. Their thunderous roaring resounded across the plains and echoed through the penitentiaries of hell.
The Great and terrible Armies of the Lord.
* * *
Dagon galloped his charger towards Lucifer and Charsoc. ‘The First Heaven’s armies gather on the plains of Perdition, Your Majesty,’ he growled. ‘Your brothers, the great princes, lead them.’
‘Yes, yes...,’ Lucifer said dismissively. ‘I hear the roarings and commotion. We knew they would assemble.’ He smiled triumphantly at Charsoc. ‘We hold their King.’
‘They have no claim,’ Charsoc declared.
Lucifer nodded, grinning evilly. ‘Michael well knows that if they so much as set foot through my gates, they trespass according to Eternal Law ... And my brothers are sticklers for Eternal Law.’ He yawned. ‘Relay to my royal brother a message. Tell him I have a tomb specially prepared for the Nazarene: the black sepulchre.’
‘And I have one waiting for Michael!’ Moloch roared.
A mighty roar rose up from Moloch’s butchers. ‘Tear Prince Michael asunder!’ they howled.
Lucifer smiled. ‘Let us forget my brother’s torments for the moment. We have our prize – we hold their King.’
‘My Lord...,’ Moloch bellowed, his voice full of dark intent. ‘Permission for some sport, great king of hell.’ He bowed deeply, and Lucifer nodded. ‘We would bow before the Nazarene,’ he said, leering at Jesus. ‘We would crown Him King.’
A grotesque smile lit up Lucifer’s face. He nodded.
‘Let us crown the Nazarene King!’ Moloch roared. At this, a strident wail rose from the wort devourers, soon echoed by the depraved multitudes inside the hellish penitentiaries.
The grim procession slowed at the dark laboratories. A party of cackling, orange-haired, deformed dark younglings emerged from the vast, sweltering underground corridors carrying a cruel-looking iron contraption, still glowing-hot from the smelting cauldron, to Moloch. It was a twisted iron crown of thorns moulded in iron.
Lucifer nodded. ‘Crown the Nazarene, that He may be King of hell for a moment.’
Jeering laughter broke out anew among Moloch’s legions. Hysterical cackles and demented laughter broke out on every side as Moloch lifted the scorching crown in his brawny arms, high above Jesus.
‘Unbind His mouth, that we may hear the Nazarene’s screams of agony!’ Moloch roared. At once the vandals tore away the filthy cloths that gagged Jesus’ lips.
Moloch pushed the cruel, jagged hot iron thorns down savagely onto His captive’s skull.
An earth-shaking tremor shuddered, and at once the crystal road collapsed into the burning pitch, like a magnet sucking the armies of hell down into the orange flames. As volcanoes spurted white-hot infernos around them, Moloch hovered above the jagged remains of the crystal path. One by one, his twelve butchers fell, sucked down by the ferocious flames. Charsoc was flung facedown onto the road, his eye sockets burning, his body twisting in agony. ‘The Nazarene!’ he cried as a blinding flash illuminated the shadowed penitentiary of the grave.
Lucifer watched in horrified disbelief as the brazen gates at the entrance to the shadowed realm shattered, the iron bars of the penetentiaries smashed to smithereens. Jesus of Nazareth had vanished. ‘Where is the Nazarene?’ Lucifer screamed. ‘Mobilize hell’s armies. Take every general, each satanic prince, to the Black Palace. Post them at every entrance. Command Dagon ... Darsoc – safeguard the black necropolis. The Nazarene would commandeer the Ark of the Race of Men!’
He stared past Charsoc in horror as the slumbering inmates of the shadowed realm started to rouse inside their crystal prison. A blinding purple light flashed, illuminating the shadowlands as bright as a thousand thousand suns.
‘Do it now!’ he screamed, shielding his eyes as the iron penitentiary cliffs crumbled. ‘The Nazarene would overturn hell!’
* * *
The vast armies of the First Heaven stood at attention, waiting in silence. Michael rode to Jether and the ancient ones in front of hell’s gates. All twenty-four kings raised their white-crowned heads from their supplications.
Jether nodded to Michael.
Michael raised his hand, and a great, thunderous cry arose across the plains. ‘Storm the Gates of Hell!’ Michael cried. ‘Lucifer is mine!’
Chapter Forty
Warrior King
Jesus strode through the marble halls of Lucifer’s Black Palace, across the gleaming lapis floors, His imperial countenance set. His indigo robe billowed as He walked under the vast ornamental ceilings, past the sinister frescos that adorned the walls of Lucifer’s inner sanctum. He raised His silver lash of cords in His fist; instantly the two enormous black gate
s to Lucifer’s throne room flung open before Him.
Facing Him, a league away down the nave, in front of Lucifer’s empty glistening diamond throne, stood ninety ferocious warriors – Lucifer’s elite militia generals of the Black Horde. Dagon and his generals stared at Jesus in disbelieving dread.
Behind the throne lay a colossal black garnet altar, its gleaming surface covered with thousands of spluttering black tapers permeating the chamber with the aroma of pure frankincense. Above loomed an enormous translucent vortex of black crystal. Beyond the altar lay the Golden Gates of the Chamber of the Black Necropolis that housed the Ark of the Race of Men.
‘You trespass, Nazarene,’ hissed Mulciber. Thick yellow drool fell from his black tongue onto the crystal floor.
The vigilantes stared defiantly at Jesus, their broadswords raised, their pale straw-coloured eyes narrowed, their mangled faces contorted with evil. Snarling black yellow-eyed jaguars paced restlessly, chained to their depraved masters, their black fangs visible.
‘What do you want of us, Nazarene?’ Ramuel spat, his eyes glinting with iniquity. ‘We are the fallen – you have no place with us...’
Ramuel circled Jesus slowly like a wolf gauging its prey, his axe held high. Twenty of his gigantic minions joined him, their maces, cudgels, battle-axes, and cutlasses raised, their filthy braided black hair dangling past their thighs.
Jesus stood unmoving.
Dagon, towering a full head over his minions, shoved Mulciber and Ramuel out of his path. Fresh goat’s blood dripped from his mouth and nostrils. Leering at Jesus through his glazed pale eyes, he shoved his iron ball and chain under his enemy’s chin. Jesus deliberately unwound the lash. He could see Dagon’s reflection in the crystal floor.
‘Look at me when I speak, Nazarene!’ he bellowed. He screamed instructions in a guttral angelic tongue to his militia, raising his other hand, which held a cat-o’-nine-tails tipped with jagged glass and serrated iron.