"Is it much farther?" Noah whined and dragged his feet as the two damned creatures made their way to Gehenna. A demon and the wraith had left the carbonized cities of Hell far behind. The menacing mechanical peaks were barely visible over Noah's shoulder.
"Yes, much, much farther. Much more dangerous now, too," Sanguchirum explained. The giant monster led the way to a ruined temple discovered thousands of years ago.
"Won't we get in trouble for leaving the city?" Noah picked up a petrified branch of something, but it crumbled to ash in his hand. There were no trees around, only a flat expanse of rusted, soured dust.
"Who would stop us?"
"I don't know. Satan? Isn't he in charge here?"
Sanguchirum tossed his black-maned head back and roared with laughter, "You idiot! Do you think Satan is in charge? He's not our warden; he's a prisoner here, like the rest of us!" The demon turned and slashed at Noah in rage, but his claws passed right through. An unholy boon had turned the young man into a wraith after he was damned to Hell.
"Well, then why do you call him the Prince of Hell and all that?"
"I don't call him that. Humans called him that. He can't even leave the Depths, and he can't control the Damned. Nothing controls us."
"I'm hungry."
"There is no food or drink here." Sanguchirum reared on his hind legs and sniffed the acrid air. Ions buzzed around his nostrils. A radiation storm condensed in the distance.
"I need to find shelter." The hellbeast used his senses to detect empty pockets and caverns underground.
Glaucous-green clouds churned low in the distance, laced with tendrils of lightning. The wind turned ferocious, but Noah's damned spectral form felt nothing. "Can that storm hurt me?" Noah stood at the mouth of a cave Sanguchirum uncovered.
"No. Intangibility means intangibility. The soul you stole was meant to be my sacrifice to get the boon. But you're trash, and you're stuck as a wraith for the rest of your worthless eternal existence." Sanguchirum retreated deeper into the cave. The demon belched fire to scatter bothersome insects and spirits. Even beasts of Hell were threatened by giant black centipedes with pinchers that flayed the flesh from bone. "Wake me when the storm recedes."
Noah sat at the cave opening and watched the clouds descend. He felt neither wind nor sulfurous hail on his face. There was no way to measure the passage of time, so he sat, transfixed, by the churning sea of clouds above. Finally, everything turned dark, misty, and settled. Noah looked to the horizon, but could no longer see the city of Hell. He went to get the demon.
Sanguchirum followed the wraith out of the cave. The barren plain had been thoroughly soaked and mutated into a poisoned swamp.
"Bile weeps from the ground and pools in low areas," the monster explained. "We go this way."
The pair made slow, serpentine progress through the swamp. The wraith and the demon wandered for a long time, years, Noah felt in his internal calendar. Sanguchirum remained silent when they finally exited the swamp fog, but Noah could not contain himself and gasped loudly, "Whoa!"
Before them, a flat, vast, and sandy expanse stretched deep into the distance. Above, dense, fluffy clouds diffused bright white light, like a cloudy afternoon back in the living world. A break in the clouds revealed green deciduous forests, a pearly winding river, and snow-capped mountains inverted high in the sky.
"What the hell is that up there?" Noah pointed to the world overhead.
"No way to know. It is not the living world. Probably a kind of purgatory or benign reality trapped here with us," the demon explained as they made their way across the endless plain.
They passed eons-dead colossi the size of mountains, slumped with rusted greatswords buried in the dirt. Sanguchirum pointed out crude mud structures in the distance, home to ancient entities banished by the Almighty before the Earth took form.
"I learned of Gehenna from them. Soon, they will turn to ash, and I will be the sole possessor of this knowledge."
"What knowledge?"
"A doorway exists that connects this plain of existence to all the others. Escape and opportunity."
"Come on, we're dead. Not like we can go to another reality and start all over." Noah looked up at the misty world above longingly. The clouds never thinned enough to show details, and it frustrated him. It looked so familiar like he'd flown over the same landscape in an airplane.
"I'm not staying here." Sanguchirum led them further still until Noah was able to perceive a slight curvature of the horizon.
"You never told me what Gehenna actually is. Is it the portal?"
"It was a place of sacrifice, especially children. Ancient kings would offer animals, slaves, and, most often, sons to the fires of Baal. The Valley of Gehenna in the living world was a tiny facsimile of the true temple. Here in Hell, the temple distorts space and time, drawing energy from a dark, unseen force. You will hear the distortions as we get closer."
"Is Baal the one who gave me this boon in exchange for the kid I killed? I can't remember now." Noah tried to remember the circumstances of his death and damnation, but the memory had faded. Hell eroded all.
"Yes." Sanguchirum had explained to the young man, when Noah first arrived in Hell, that he would soon lose all knowledge of himself and the living world. "We are here to be forgotten," he had said.
As they continued their march, the horizon morphed upward into a symmetrical open curve. The wraith perceived the ground rising up all around them, as though they were walking into an empty cauldron. Noah heard the dark energy within seethe, contract, and release with a thunderous hammer on the universe.
The center of the caldera was dark. Noah was blind in the corners of his vision.
"The fire still burns down there." Sanguchirum pointed to the epicenter of the dark energy. "That's where we must go."
As the pair descended, the ground became smooth stone, and the sky disappeared. The only source of light came from a pulse from the destination. Even in incorporeal form, Noah felt the waves of gravity break across and shove him back and forth.
"Do you feel it? Can you see it? This beautiful darkness…" The demon gestured to the core of the profaned temple. There smoldered the agitated, dying heart of a star.
"Enter it, and tell me what you see," Sanguchirum commanded Noah.
The light was barely perceivable now as Noah crept closer. He felt the heat and was mesmerized by the swirling surface of black, red, and gold, like a sphere of rapidly cooling slag. The wraith reached out and touched the surface. He felt nothing.
"Are you sure this is the right place?" Noah called over his shoulder but could not see or hear Sanguchirum. With a shrug, the young man crossed the threshold of the dark star's surface and disappeared. Drawn ever closer to the star's core by dark energy, Noah's ethereal body was torn apart, decimated, and absorbed, never to be released from the inescapable well of gravity.
The demon Sanguchirum, having observed Noah's disintegration, was already on his way back to the cities of Hell. "Fool," he concluded.
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