I hope you have a nice afterlife in hell.
In hell, time didn’t exist. Only fire. It was easy to loseyourself in the flames and become just another one of the tortured souls,faceless and nameless.
Most souls lost their identities within the first day.Madara held onto his until he lost his sense of time.
That was how he found the corpse. It was one of thedemons, crumpled on the ground and still. It looked like it’d been assaulted,which wasn’t strange. Sometimes the demons quarreled and only one got to walkaway.
Curiosity drove him towards it. It was hideous, this thing,ugly and pockmarked with old wounds. He had half a mind to discard it… but someold, unfamiliar instinct rose up within him and for reasons he couldn’t explain, he knelt down by it and pressed his hand into one of its gapingwounds.
Black blood oozed out of its putrid, pink-grey flesh.
Consume, whispereda quiet part of his brain. He obeyed.
He felt like a carrion creature, devouring the dead becausehe couldn’t hunt the living. But he was also a shinobi (even though he nolonger remembered what that meant) and survival came before pride. It wasdisgusting but he forced down mouthful after mouthful, and for the time in days(months? Years?) his stomach was full.
He kept it up. Every time he found a corpse, he ate until hewas bloated and then he curled up and slept until hunger gnawed him awake. Hecould feel something in him changing as he did. A new hunger. He hadn’t been hungrysince he got here but, paradoxically, eating only made him hungrier. He didn’tquestion it, because the hunger had gnawed him down to an animal.
Madara ate the first demon that he killed. It was disgustinglike the corpses but in a different way. Where the former had been like rotten meat, the freshly killed ones were ashy and greasy, overcooked fat rolled on anashtray, and their black blood coated his insides like tar. But he felt strongerafter he did it.
More of his mind came back to him. He was beginning to graspthe basic principles of the afterlife and, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t too differentfrom life. The strong ate the weak. Only far, far more literal.
He felt… grounded. More flesh and blood, more real. So thenext one he also ate, and the one after that. The more he did it, the morehabitual it became until it felt wrong to noteat what he killed.
That was how Madara found the stairs. It was discordant inthe blasted wasteland he was used to, a piece of architecture left out in theopen like someone’s trash. He couldn’t see where it lead up to. But theunbidden instinct in him – the one that instructed him to consume – told him toclimb.
So he did. He crawled up the stairs until he was starvingand he climbed further. He entered the noxious clouds of volcanic gas that he’donly previously looked up at, and it threatened to choke him. His eyes dried upto uselessness. His lungs cried out for air. His mouth became a desert,everything dry and parched.
But he continued to climb until he reached something new.
He looked around the land around him. Unlike the one hecame from, this one was dimly-lit and everything was slick black obsidian.There was a dull glow in the distance, like a distant sunset, and he hauledhimself up.
Intellect glimmered in his head again. Not just instinctanymore, but understanding. Knowing. He… could do something about this abilityto move. Being able to eat meantsomething too. He was still too washed out to understand everything, but it wasbeginning to come together now.
There was a noise in the distance, like the snuffling ofsome large creature. His hunger clawed his gut.
Time to eat.
