That was Lilum’s voice, Adam heard interposed with the demon’s own. He thought of the mistakes the priestess had made thus far since they arrived at this Hellscape. Thinking too of her promises, he posed Naberius a question. “I’m not going to like what I find, am I?”
The Crow kept quiet.
“It’s alright. You don’t have to tell me. I came down here knowing what it likely was. But I have another question, something more important. I was promised that this person…this Father or King or whatever he is would return the souls of those who died, that they would come to life again once he was freed. Is that…” Adam hesitated. “… is any of that true?”
Just as the Messah finished asking his question, they arrived at an opening in the tunnel of cages. It was as if a million kennels had been rent apart, their bronze bars refigured into an aviary of sorts. Above, someone had rigged chains and platforms to winches in the ceiling. Below—far, far below—there gaped a hole like the pit in the cathedral.
“There was meant to be a lift, only Lord Astaroth never finished it, so I wish to apologize for the indignity. I must carry you the rest of the way.” The demon cocked his head to look at the pastor’s son—not with the jasper eyes but the crow ones at the sides. Adam smiled, and finally Naberius broke and replied, “As to your question. You should know the Xanthos King wants but one thing and that is revenge. To this end, yes, he seeks to raise the dead. But mortal…you do not yet understand what is meant.”
“‘Yet?’ So I will understand soon?”
“Yes, but such wisdom will only torture you further.”
Adam breathed deep the stench of the Kennels, stared into the pit, exhaled. “So it was a lie. I’m never seeing Magdalynn or my father ever again.”
“No,” the crow agreed. “But I will do this one thing for you, because I will not acquiesce to this craven deception. The legate would never have stood for it either. But know this: I cannot promise anything will be done, but I will take you to Asmodeus.”
“How can he help me?”
Naberius spread his wings in the open air of the aviary. A few black feathers floated of into the abyss on the light and warm winds drawn ever downwards. Then the demon took flight, each beat of its wings striating its flesh with thick, wiry musculature. Adam gawked, amazed, thinking maybe one day he would, in Heaven or Hell, be so freed from the oppression of mortal gravity. And as if in answer, a pair of scaly talons snatched him up at either shoulder.
Circling for the pit, said Naberius between the beat of his wings, “Asmodeus is lord of the Refinery….He alone is master of severing the immortal soul…from the finite dregs of memory…and the incarnated, fleshy material…” Beats went by. They were right above the pit when the crow finished with, “Perhaps their forms and flesh have yet to be rended down.”
From thence there was darkness, then light from below. They’d passed through a cracked dome like that of Limbo into the shared spheres of the Garrison and the Great Lake of Fire. A single, black stone battlement separated the two; atop it, a demon unicorn blasted his brass trumpet, rousing thirty-thousand ranks of corpses dressed in bronze. Every one of their nine-hundred million pikes butted the ground. It shook the entire sphere. The Lake bubbled, and waves crashed over a fleet of iron warships.
“I can escort you no further,” Naberius crowed just loud enough for the Messah to hear. “Find Kimaris of the Vaults. Tell him you seek light amidst the darkness. Farewell.”
The trumpet blasted, and pikes pounded. Talons loosed Adam over the roiling Lake. His stomach turned, and he gritted his teeth, but there was no bracing against the heat and light of the fire. Closer.
Closer.
He struck the surface, sank deeper and deeper down the gullet of the Lake, yet the only burning seemed to be that of his own swallowed vomit. For these were not flames; they were the viscous dregs of sloughed humanity—memories of who their heritors could have been, lit ablaze and brazed together, now but fire of another’s ambition. This the Messah saw as the Lake pulled him under until under became the bank of a black brook at the edge of a forest.
At once, Adam staggered from the water, now aware what it was, and stumbled for the trees and the lights among their branches. They seemed to dance, those lights. Without lamps or candles they shone white among the pale wood. And there was light on the wind as well, golden and warm and always whirling in the same direction—toward the heart of the forest. “Where I must go,” Adam heard himself say, and as if to confirm his utterance, a mare trotted out from behind the trees. Her coat was black and her hooves silent, eyes blinded by cataracts white as her mane. “Poor thing,” the Messah said as he tested her friendliness. Indifferent, he thought, petting her nose to no response. Impatient. “Do you want me to climb on?”
The mare stared, blind and silent, saddleless, and he with no experience riding but on camels. He took another look at the forest, at the individual trees and their dancing white lights almost silver up close. There was something eerie about them, something familiar and horrible that the Messah could not place. Then he noticed a face carved into one of the trees—all of the trees. He saw the subtle human form, twisted slightly as if in agony. And the wisps of silver light—their own desires burning before their eyes.
Suddenly, Adam could see his own fate in each of the trees, the lights, the shadows in between. He saw his failure, his last desperate dream dashed into fragments at the Devil’s feet. It would last forever, his torture at the hands of the Xanthos King: shards of
