When those moments of sanity came, Nyx fought to keep them longer, to grasp every moment of clarity before the Hellfire once more drowned her mind in pain and remembered cruelty. I must get out! was always Nyx’s first thought when sanity returned.
Nyx tried. She willed her body to heal in those rare, lucid moments. She willed a hand or foot or part of an arm to heal enough for her to push against the sides of the too-small, jagged-edge-filled box that Lucifer had locked her in. She even tried healing her face enough to bite at the Hellstone of her too-small prison. And each time the box proved too strong, and her hand or foot or arm or jaw would break again. The pain would flash through her, tearing away her will. Then the Hellfire would once more gain the upper hand, eating her flesh and burning into her mind. And Nyx would slip into madness.
The Hellfire was cruel. It burned away flesh and muscle and organs with a cold flame that chilled rather than warmed. And as it burned, it made its victims experience every vile deed they had ever performed. Every pain or cruelty they had inflicted upon another, they would feel as if that pain or cruelty was being inflicted on them.
Nyx, Queen of Hell, had inflicted untold suffering upon millions, and the agony of reliving it was far greater than the continuously breaking bones of her battered, abused body.
The last thought Nyx had every time the sanity faded, and the Hellfire took control once more, was, There is no way out.
When the Hellfire took her mind, Nyx murdered herself, gutted herself, ripped her own throat out, tortured herself for information, buried herself under a hundred tons of rubble just to hear herself scream. She killed or maimed herself in a hundred different ways, and every act she had to live through magnified her madness. She cowered in terror from herself. She pleaded with herself. She laughed at herself, and then it all happened again. And again. She had a thousand names, a million names; she was everyone and no one.
And that was only the violence she had inflicted on the living. To the dead she had done far, far worse, for she was the Queen of Hell, and she had punished the sinners with relish. And the Hellfire made her experience those punishments as well.
Her skin was flayed away again and again.
Her throat was torn out with her own teeth.
She was cut slowly to ribbons with her own talons.
She fed herself to demons.
She gave herself a thousand, thousand other tortures, without end.
And those were still not the worst.
The worst memories were the memories of Heaven and the rebellion she had led there.
Nyx had led an army of Angels against God. They had marched to the base of his mountain to demand free will for all of their kind. And at the base of God’s mountain they had met God’s host and engaged in a battle that lasted eons.
And so, as the Hellfire burned her, Nyx became all the Angels she had destroyed under her blade in Heaven. Nyx felt the pain of her sword ripping into flesh and screamed the screams of those she’d killed. She felt the pain of the rebels in Hell as she and hers fought for dominance. Worse, she felt the limitless, unending disappointment and sorrow of God as he watched his creations destroy each other. But that pain was a kind of blank. No soul, not even hers, could bear the pain of God. She did bear it, but she didn’t know she was bearing it, and she did not remember it. It marked her in ways that were hidden forever.
Some of the agonies she suffered were not gigantic, but still were beyond her understanding. Not being human, she hadn’t known what it would be like to see her family die, to lose belief that God existed, to know that cherished dreams could no longer be fulfilled in the short time left to her. And even now, she lived through that psychological torture without knowing exactly what it was. She knew it was human, that was all. That she, the Queen of Hell, was suffering as countless humans had done, but without end.
And then sanity would come again, and once more Nyx would struggle to break free. Because she was Queen of Hell, and she would be revenged against Lucifer, who had been her lieutenant, and Tribunal, who was the Son of God. The two of them together had done this to her.
Again and again and again she came to herself and struggled and fought and screamed silent screams through burned-away vocal cords and lungs. And again and again she fell back into the madness until her body could, again, rally enough to heal itself.
And because this was Hell, where nothing could die, Nyx knew that the torture could last longer than time itself. It could, and would, go on for eternity if Lucifer wanted it to. And so she struggled and fought, trying to find a way to escape.
Until one time, sanity came, and Nyx no longer had the will to struggle.
She could not heal her body. She could not break the box that held her. She could not escape the Hellfire. No matter how hard she tried, she would only break again and sink into insanity. So this time, instead of fighting it, she was utterly still until the Hellfire once more took control of her body and mind, and her sanity disappeared under the weight of all the violence she had done to others.
A hundred times she lay quiescent through the cycle of pain and madness and sanity before a new idea came to her.
It did not come fully formed. It came as a tenuous thread of thought, which she clung to in the maelstrom of pain and anguish that the Hellfire inflicted on her mind.
Another hundred cycles of pain came and went.
And when Nyx once more rose to sanity, instead of struggling, she poured all her power into the Hellstone box that was crushing her body.
Hellstone was not a natural substance, carved from the rocks of Hell. Rather, it was made by torturing fallen souls until all their humanity, all sense of self and physicality, vanished, until they were reduced to a hard, black stone that could be molded and shaped as the Descended wished. Inside the stone, the soul suffered unending torments, and this unimaginable suffering increased further when it was reshaped to suit the Descended’s needs.
From these broken and battered souls, Nyx had decorated her castle. She had made devices and weapons and instruments of torture. So had every other Angel. And when an Angel got bored, he or she would heal the damaged souls within the Hellstone, restoring the flesh that clothed their souls in Hell and returning them to a physical form—sometimes perfect in its parts, completely healed—that could be tormented down to Hellstone again.
And so, when sanity came again, Nyx poured her power into the Hellstone box, directing it into the stone beside one of the many slits that let the Hellfire seep inside. She channeled all of it into a single soul that had been tortured down to stone, then twisted and bent to the shape Lucifer had wanted. Every bit of strength she had went into that soul, and just before the Hellfire overwhelmed her, she saw him changing from Hellstone back to flesh.
The soul had been a man. He had killed for money and raped for pleasure. He had murdered his own children for food. And though, as Queen of Hell, she was sure his punishment was just, Nyx poured her energy into him so that his physical form could break free from the Hellstone.
He split away, eyes wide and mouth screaming with the agony of the Hellfire. He kept his form only a moment before the flames took him. The Hellfire lake, so merciless on Angelic flesh, was catastrophic to the physical forms the souls took when they came to Hell. The lake of Hellfire consumed his flesh almost at once, leaving only a skeleton, its mouth wide with agony, to float up to the surface. The currents of the lake, slow-moving and twisting, would eventually carry him to shore, to be picked up and tortured by the other Descended Angels.
And just before the madness took Nyx once more, she managed to put one broken finger against the slit in the side of the box, and felt that it was wider than it had been before.
It’s a start, Nyx thought as the madness came again.
When sanity returned, Nyx once more poured her power into one of the souls trapped in the Hellstone. This one was a woman who had cheated on her husband with all manner of men and had poisoned him when he found out about it.
The
next one was another woman. She had kidnapped babies from their mothers and used them in a hideous ritual meant to bring her own stillborn child back to life.
The next was a man. A professional mercenary who’d killed two hundred in his time: soldiers, old men, women, and even children.
Two dozen more times Nyx came back to sanity, and two dozen more souls she released from the sides of the Hellstone box to be consumed in the Lake of Fire. And when the twenty-fourth soul had been freed, the hole in the side of the box was big enough for her to squeeze her head through.
She was still broken from head to foot. Every bit of her had been smashed. To heal it all would take more power than Nyx had. Once more, she let herself go still.
Five cycles of madness later, Nyx knew how she was going to get out.
Now, each time the madness receded, Nyx focused on her body, forcing her bones, held together solely by Angelic will, to move themselves inch by inch out of the box.
She straightened her spine first, which forced her crushed skull out of the hole. Then she let her skull heal back to its proper shape. She kept working on her spine until the shards of her collarbones were free of the box. Then she healed those. Her arms were next, and those took a very long time, for she had to break and bend and twist the bones again and again until they pulled free from the box. Then she focused on healing her hands until they became claws that sank into the bed of the Lake of Fire. And every time sanity returned after that, she pulled with those hands, drawing her body inch by inch out of the box.
And because Nyx was the Queen of the Descended Angels and Queen of Hell, and because her body was Angelic flesh, when it was no longer trapped under the jagged, bone-breaking edges of the Hellstone box, it began to truly heal itself.
Ribs, pelvis, legs, feet: all came together and healed. Muscles began to regrow over bone, and skin over muscle. And as each part of her healed, Nyx gained a little more strength to maintain her mind against the Hellfire. The anguish was still there, the reliving of the pain and suffering she had inflicted no less agonizing than it had been before. Only now she could create a space in her mind where she could keep part of herself separate and sane while she suffered.
My time in this lake is nearly over. Then I will be revenged.
She let the currents carry her healing body where they would, using only as much energy as was necessary to keep her deep in the lake, well below the sight of the Angels and demons who prowled the edges. Nyx had no intention of being spotted because if Lucifer found her, it would not only be he she would have to contend with, but with the entire might of the Legions of Hell. Lucifer was now the unchallenged master of this realm, and Nyx would not take him on head-to-head. Not until she was certain she stood a fighting chance.
Then there’s the Son of God to deal with.
Tribunal was going to destroy the human race. He had said he was going to wipe the humans from the earth and make it a playground for the Descended. Then he was going to create for the Descended and himself a Paradise in place of the Heaven they had lost.
That had been his promise to Nyx. And he had broken it.
He had asked her to create a faith to rival and defeat Christianity, and she had. He had asked her to kill all the Christians in Jerusalem, and she had. He had asked her to bring into being an Angel, and he had given her the WORD of Creation so she would have the power to do it. And she had done that, too.
He had also asked her to kill that Angel, and she could not.
And that bastard knew I wouldn’t be able to kill her. He had to have known. Why else would he have had Lucifer’s legions standing by to destroy me?
Sorrow, having nothing to do with the tortures of the Lake of Fire, filled her mind. He killed my Angel. He killed Epiphenia. The image of that fresh-faced and ravishing creature filled her mind.
Angels could not die in Hell, neither Ascended nor Descended. But Epiphenia was an Angel born on Earth, of the Earth. Lucifer had kidnapped her and brought her to Hell, and Tribunal had killed her in a place where nothing was able to die.
Nyx, imbued with all the power Tribunal had given her, and with her favorite Descended Angels, Persephone and Ishtar, at her side, had fought against Lucifer’s 666th Legion on Earth when they tried to take her. And when Nyx had failed there, and Ishtar had been captured, Nyx and Persephone together made the journey to Hell to raise an army and fight for Epiphenia there.
They had lost. Persephone had been cut down and Nyx, though she had made it to Lucifer’s palace, had been crushed by Tribunal, the Son of God, whose power outweighed hers as Nyx’s power outweighed any human warrior’s.
After having suffered what she’d put humans through for a thousand years, Nyx understood her grief over Epiphenia differently now. It was the same pain, but it had more depth and resonance as she experienced a sort of empathy with human mothers. The Angel had been her daughter—the only daughter ever born to Angelic kind. She belonged to Nyx, and Tribunal had taken her, had killed her. The agony of that was something new to Nyx. It was worse than anything Hellstone could do to her.
I will not let them win. I will find a way to destroy them. I swear it. Nyx drifted along the bottom of the Lake of Hell, her body writhing in agony, her mind filled with the pain and suffering she had caused others to feel. The only question is, how?
She was not in a position of strength. She was alone in Hell, and Lucifer had an army of Descended Angels to fight against her.
While she had been Tribunal’s lover, he had poured power into her body, giving her strength beyond imagining so that she could survive using the WORD to create Epiphenia. She had used all that strength in her battle through Hell to rescue her Angel. When her small force had been destroyed and she was all that was left, Nyx had used the WORD once more to clear a path. All the power that she had been given was ripped away then, when she’d used the WORD in battle, and afterward she was no more than herself. When she had finally faced Lucifer she was only Nyx.
Against Lucifer, that should have been enough. She had fought him before and she had broken him. Nyx would have done the same again had not Tribunal, Son of God, part of God, and an embodiment of God, used his power to crush her.
The bastard. The betraying, monstrous son-of-a-bastard. How the fuck am I going to fight Tribunal?
Wrong question, Nyx decided. Too soon. First, I have to get out of here. I need to escape Hell. Then I can take on Tribunal.
So how do I escape Hell?
Angels could sense each other’s presence, whether in Heaven, Earth, or Hell. If Lucifer decided to search for her, he would be able to track her down easily enough. The thing was, if he wasn’t looking for her, Lucifer would know she was in Hell, but not where, no matter how close she stood to him.
As long as he didn’t recognize whoever stood beside him as Nyx.
It would not be enough to take another form. She would need to build an entire life inside herself, for when Lucifer looked at her, he would look beyond her physical self and into her soul. He would see the true form of her being long before she came close enough to drive her sword into him.
Unless it isn’t my soul he’s seeing.
Nyx stopped letting the currents drag her and crawled along the bottom until she fetched up against one of the walls of the Lake of Fire. From there she began crisscrossing the lake, moving as fast as she could, and hoping no one would notice her movement reflected in ripples of Hellfire above.
She ran into, grabbed, examined, and discarded a hundred souls as she crossed back and forth across the lake. None of them would do. She also ran into a hundred Angels, chained to the bottom of the Lake of Fire and driven mad by it. As soon as she touched these, she shied away. None reached for her or seemed to recognize her. All were too wrapped in their own torment.
Lucifer’s doing. Probably they were loyal to me despite him.
She considered helping them break free but knew that it would do no good. If she released them, they would be caught and tortured until they told Lucifer
how they escaped—which would fuck up her plans—and then they would be chained again. So she left them in their agony. When she had Lucifer’s still-screaming head dangling from her fist, she would have time to bring them out of the lake and let them regain their senses.
Finally, on the bottom of the deepest part of the lake, she found the Hellstone box in which she had been imprisoned.
It was more than just a box. It had been chained shut with great Hellstone chains, made of links as thick as her arm. Each chain ended in an enormous Hellstone boulder, large enough that it had sunk into the bottom of the Lake of Fire.
Each link, every stone, and the box itself were made from the remains of tortured human souls. All Nyx needed to do was find the right one.
More hours passed. Nyx poured what power she could into the box without risking succumbing to the Hellfire again. Not healing, this time, but seeking.
Every one of the souls was vile. There were rapists and murderers, pedophiles and poisoners, wicked men who cheated others out of their livelihood, and evil women who used their wiles to destroy others’ lives. Nyx looked into each soul and left it where it was. None of them would suit her needs. Then she found it, the right one.
It was a woman, a mother driven to desperation by cold and by hunger, living in a brutal community that would give her neither help nor support. She had watched her youngest child die first, starving and freezing, and watched as rats swarmed over a body that no one would bury. Her other children were on the brink of death when she decided she would give them all a last bit of warmth before they died. Gathering the mauled body of her dead child and dragging her two cold, starving children with her, she had snuck into the community hay barn. There, shivering with the frigid cold and watching her desperate children trying to eat hay to fill their swollen, starving bellies, she had taken up her only possessions—a flint and a striking iron—and applied them to the hay piled around her pitiful family. Then she pulled her children, living and dead, close to her and felt warm for the first time in years before the smoke and fire overcame them all.