Hell is a Curious place: Arrival
Hell is a curious place, full of strangeness, horror and pain. It starts with your journey there, a long downfall. Your metaphysical body gets torn out of your physical shell and pulled downward. At first you fall through the ground and almost feel like being pulled through a heavy sludge. For me it was particularly interesting. My last living memory is from the party after my aunts wedding, a terrible party to be honest. I must have felt that way back then too, since I got absolutely wasted the moment I could. My memories stop roughly after the vows were spoken, then there is a haze of dancing and drinking vodka shots. This blurry mess of memory ends with my head jamming into the steering wheel, and then with my body becoming one with the steel of my car and the wood of a tree. There was no pain though.
The moment my head connected with the steering wheel my soul went through the car. It must have been flung forward with quite a lot of speed since I passed through the tree and then hit the ground. Immediately getting submerged in it and getting pushed down. For a few moments I remained in this dark sludge, until I tore through some sort of barrier. I broke through the ceiling of a cavern head first and proceeded to connect face first with the ground. And let me tell you the first lethal injury is always the hardest. I must have broken a lot of bones, including my neck. So I laid there for what felt like a week, only contracting from time to time until I could slowly begin to move. When I could crawl I crawled to the nearest corner so I could cry in the cold cave. You know, I really would have liked to sleep, but you cannot sleep here, you only get tired.
It took a while until my body was healed enough that I found the strength to move. When I did, I still limped down the pathway that led out of the cavern. With each step forward the air grew colder and the shivers got worse. I walked for a long time, resting often because of the pain. By the time I was halfway there I was already sound as a bell... except for the sleep deprivation and a bit of frostbite. Nonetheless I kept on moving through the tunnel, that was getting narrower so slowly that I didn't realize it. Nearing the end of the passage, it got so mal I could only fit while crawling. I squeezed through the last passage, until it suddenly broke down under my weight. And again I fell.
This time I had the luck to fall down into the river. I broke through the layer of ice on top of it and got cut up pretty badly by it. At the same time though, I was awake like never before, stripped of the fatigue by the sudden shock of icy water on my skin. I panicked and tried to get hold of something... anything. Back then my survival instincts were still active. I somehow managed to get on top of the ice and crawled to the cold shore. Soon after getting there, freezing cold, barely breathing and shivering as hard as never before, I passed out. Or at least what can be called passing out down here. I was still aware of my body but my eyes were not working and my body not moving.
When I finally came to I painfully forced myself up, leaving behind patches of skin that were frozen on the ground. It took a lot of effort to rip them off, but I needed to go. I was called by something. I moved along the riverline and was often searching for a sun or something, but I never found where the cold white lightoriginated, that shun upon the tundra around me. It took a long time, but I reached the lake. When I first saw it I felt overjoyed. I saw the river opening into a big lake far ahead of me. And I knew I was not running in an endless loop, I was getting closer. A while after spotting the lake I heard faint noises. I was starting to jog at that point. After that I could hear that those noises came from human voices, hundreds of voices! They were uniform in a choir against the silence around me. And the closer I got the clearer I heard them and the faster I ran. It was then, while I was running as fast as I could, that I realized what the voices were.
The lake was stretching out before me with its open water. At the outlet of the river the ice stopped and made way for a dark liquid. But what caught my eye was not the lake, but it's shore. Hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women where washed up at the shore. Lying there, shivering and freezing. They in turn where surrounded by countless large beings, of which some where pulling wagons, some where taking notes, while some where marking people with iron rods. Others where torturing and killing the humans than picking up the remains and tossing them into the wagons. Those humans that yet had to come to where left alone. While those awake created a symphony of Screams and whimpers.
The beings pulling the wagons had deformed spines, elongated arms and shortened legs, yet tons of muscle so they walked on their foreclaws. Their skin was covered with millions of razorsharp needles, effectively creating a dangerous fur, that ripped everyone apart foolish enough to touch them. They had no facial features, except for an obsidian orb sitting in the centre of their head in a burnt socket, with which they seemed to perceive their surroundings. Their ears where missing as well, but they had a strong collar made of a black metal embracing their neck. Two rods of the same metal where connecting them to the wagons. And whenever a wagon was filled, one of the Scribes would whisper something to the side of their head and they would move away from the lake into the surrounding tundra. And just like they went away from time to time, some of them were returning.
The Scribes on the other hand could almost be discribed as humanoid. They where as tall as two humans, but still only as high as the pulling beings shoulders. They were gaunt and clad in a silken robe with long sleeves that widened at the end, revealing their abnormally long and thin fingers on each hand. A book always rested in one hand and the other hand always held a quill, to note something whenever a human was marked by one of the rods. The robe was held in a plain color except for a symbol made of gold at the back of the robe, both color and symbol varied by Scribe, but a certain color would always be together with a certain symbol. The robes were so long that they hid the feet of the Scribes whenever they were not moving, but whenever they walked you could see their bare white feet with long toes. Their heads were gaunt and bald and looked like a very thin layer of skin was strapped upon a skeleton. Their lips were missing, so that their gums where always exposed, their eyes were cataract and where ears and noses should have rested, was only skin.
Then there where the smallest of the beings assembled around the lake. The beings that drove metal rods with symbols into the flesh of the humans, were roughly the size of a large man. They had no clothes on, exposing their mostly hairless bodies to the cold, some of them looked female and others male. While their legs ended in big ape like clawed feet, their muscular arms ended in large hands with big stumpy fingers. Their rods were made of metal and ended in a symbol that matched the Scribes Symbol that was whatching the Marker. Whenever they where marking a human they salivated over the symbol at the end of the rod with their vile greenish spit, then pushed it onto the humans skin where the spit carved out the symbol with some form of chemical burn. Sometimes when the wind would change, I could smell the stench that was left by the procedure creeping up my nostrils. Their faces where bizarrely wide, with a mouth that did not hold a single tooth, yet was big enough to swallow a human head whole. Their noses where long and sharp and they had large eyes, that where gleaming with a slight orange glow. Their ears where long and stood in a sharp angle away from their head that was covered with wild open hair, that varied from marker to marker.
I watched this spectacle for quite a while, in fascinated terror and what seemed to be awe, until I saw another being. It was a being even smaller than the Markers standing at the shore, holding a lantern that was shining in my direction. It had no nose or ears and empty spaces for eyes. Instead of skin it seemed to have brittle bone cover his head, that was splintering around the larger portion of its head so that open laying fibres would act as hair. Its open mouth with crooked teeth seemed to smile at me, as the sigil engraved upon its forehead was smouldering with a weak greenish glow. It stood there naked in the freezing cold in a little pile of what seemed to be ash, holding its lantern in one of its bony hands and pointing the other directly at me. It was calling for me.
The moment our hands met I felt the fire, bursting out of me tearing a simbol into the skin of my forehead. I was burning in a white greenish flame that burned away my soul. It felt like I was being charred, but I still could feel the freezing cold on my skin. My essence however, the stuff that lied beneath my skin, muscles and bones was being eroded by this flame. It withdrew its hand, looked me in the eyes and in a long understanding moment, it handed me the lantern which burned with new energy as my hand gripped it. I turned away from it and the lamp that I held was now lighting towards the river again, waiting for the next soul to conquer the tundra.
I still wait for the next soul, slowly burning away, until I am surrounded by ash, until my bones crack and my eyes finally burn out. So I can be the devil I was always meant to be.
