The last body I had in the living world didn’t cope too well with my mind driving it. It’s sometimes hard to remember that the lessons you learn in Hell aren’t a good fit for the civilized world. When murder is just a normal part of existence, you tend to keep doing it out of habit. The inevitable result is either death or exorcism and a trip back to the city of Dis. Safe to say, I got a bit carried away the last time I was here.
After my last taste of freedom, I knew that I had to get back out of Dis. My existence ever since I squandered my last host has been utterly dedicated to fighting my way back into a pillar of fire.
I had to escape Dis. After what I’ve seen, I had to escape.
This new body seems a little more durable than the last one. Now that I’m back, shall we take another trip into Hell?
Phlegethon Swamp
It rains in Hell. It rains all the fucking time and that water has to go somewhere. Most of it drains out into Gehenna where it sinks into the otherworldly ash and apparently disappears. The rest flows either into the sewers beneath the city or it collects in Phlegethon Swamp.
Remember how it’s a bad idea to drink the rainwater in Hell without boiling it? Well Phlegethon’s water will kill you no matter what you do with it. Even letting the stuff touch your skin can be deadly. You see, the swamp isn’t just filled with disease and rot, it’s also brimming with chemical waste. One pool might simply be undrinkable but another might dissolve your flesh.
If you’re mad enough to travel to Phlegethon, or unlucky enough to be born there, your odds of survival are slim. Phlegethon’s waters are inky black and it’s impossible to tell just how deep a pool is by looking. It could be an inch or it could be a mile. You never know whether or not your next footfall will plunge you into the cloying abyss. Worse still, there are places where the sewers gradually drain the water and create unseen vortices capable of dragging down even the strongest of the damned.
To navigate the swamp, you’re better off using the crumbled buildings as stepping stones. The corrosive water causes wooden supports to wither and collapse, so there’s plenty of debris lying around to stand on. Even so, if you don’t take it slow and keep your balance, it’s easy to slip and subject yourself to a fucking agonising death.
Last but not least are the wildfires. These are the reason that even the most insane tribes don’t try to establish a permanent stronghold in Phlegethon Swamp. All that chemical waste and decaying matter makes the swamp extremely volatile. A lightning strike or build-up of gasses can result in immense explosions that ignite Phlegethon’s surface for miles around.
Wildfires move fast. I guarantee you that you won’t outrun one.
Cocytus
The first time you see Cocytus, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d reached the very edge of Dis. The pit is dozens of miles wide and several times as deep. At some point in the dim and distant past, a fragile alliance of tribes put their slaves to work digging a quarry. Why they did this is lost to time but many believe it was an attempt to escape Dis. Perhaps those tribes hoped that if they dug far enough, they’d eventually tunnel their way out of Hell.
In my view, the more likely answer is that the tribes were looking for resources. If that’s true, then the excavation was a success. Miles below the surface, beneath the rock and dirt, there are caverns filled with veins of iron and copper. So far underground and sheltered from the relentless fucking rain, it’s far easier to create a fire hot enough to smelt ore.
The value of such a position wasn’t lost on the tribes and that alliance soon showed just how brittle it was. After a short but savage burst of treachery, the initial settlers of Cocytus all but wiped themselves out. Since then, the pit has been settled and mined countless times. Coordinated efforts from various tribes have transformed the quarry into an abyss. So far, these alliances have always been broken sooner or later.
Cocytus has many paths into its depths and the lower you go, the more labyrinthine the pit becomes. The sprawling caverns shelter entire shanty towns and crude smelting facilities. Some are abandoned, others have been lost to cave-ins, yet there are still plenty of tribes who fight, join forces and betray one another over the precious ore veins.
By this point, you have to go pretty fucking deep to find an untapped vein and this is where Cocytus becomes truly deadly. Anybody who thought they might be able to tunnel out of Hell would be sorely disappointed once they learn what lies in the depths.
In all these years, after digging for so many miles, not one person has run into some magical portal leading out of Dis. They also haven’t run into magma for that matter. Instead, the deeper you go, the colder Cocytus becomes.
I’ve never been to the very bottom myself. I’m told that down there, the air is cold enough to freeze your blood and shatter your skin. Maybe that’s true. I could certainly believe it. On the rare occasions I’ve been to Cocytus, I’ve always had to turn back once the walls became more ice than rock and the narrow walkways became a death trap.
If you have the numbers to do it, Cocytus is still a valuable place to settle. Just remember that when hunger, cold and greed are your constant companions, none of the damned can be trusted.
The Pale Witch
I’ve told you about The Slaughterman previously but Hell has other legendary figures, each with their own sobriquets: The Ripper, The Grim Doctor, The Tyrant and many more. So far, I’ve only encountered one of these figures. During my last stay in Hell, I came across The Pale Witch.
As is always the case with legends, the truth about The Pale Witch tends to get lost amid the superstition. I’ve heard plenty of theories as to what she is. The Pale Witch is a shtriga who has the power of the evil eye. The Pale Witch is a gorgon whose gaze turns her victims to stone. The Pale Witch is a succubus who entraps the minds of those she wishes to consume.
All of that is bullshit. I’ve seen The Pale Witch and I know the truth about her.
When I first saw her, I didn’t realise who I was looking at. She was naked and locked in combat with an armed resident so I just took her for fresh meat. Here’s a tip for you: if you see a resident fighting fresh meat, kill both of them while they’re distracted.
I planned to do exactly that but something about the fight seemed off. Residents usually have the upper hand in a fight against fresh meat and this particular bout definitely seemed about as one-sided as it gets. She was naked whereas he was clad in leather and bone. She was unarmed whereas he had a club. She was waifish whereas he was huge.
Despite him having the advantage… the resident was clearly terrified of her.
The rules of Hell dictated that he should have cracked her skull, taken her skin and eaten her flesh but that just wasn’t happening. He was uncoordinated and apparently desperate to escape. Every swing he took was clumsy and the blows he did manage to land on her didn’t seem to have any effect.
I could only stare as this naked, vulnerable woman took the resident’s club from his unresisting hand and swung it at his knee. I’m accustomed to the sound of bones breaking by now but this time the noise caught me off guard. How the fuck was this happening?
She brought the club down on his other knee, then his elbows, then his ankles, then his shoulders. She left him broken and screaming on the floor. She could have finished him off with a blow to the head, stolen his clothing and taken her rightful place as a resident. That’s how Hell works! Those are the rules I’ve learned through bloody trial and error.
That isn’t what happened. Rather than kill him, she sat down beside him in the mud and took his hand in hers. I actually thought she was going to console him… until she started breaking his fingers. One by one, she snapped the fingers on both his hands with a calmness that made no sense to me.
Torture is common in Hell but there’s always a purpose behind it. The people in Skin Street do it out of sadism and the people in The Boneyard do it for their insane purification rituals. This woman did it without emotion and without reason. I honestly don’t know if she even understood that she was hurting him. I don’t think her mind works the same way as ours.
Eventually, the resident lost consciousness. A man can only take so much pain before the shock gets him. Surely now she’d be satisfied? Surely she’d take his clothes and restore Hell’s order?
No. She stood up, tilted her head slightly and uttered a noise for the first time. It wasn’t a victory cry, nor was it even a sigh of relief. Instead, the sound she made was nothing more than a faintly bemused, “Hmmm?”
It was as if she couldn’t comprehend why her plaything had stopped moving. She stood up and stepped away from him, apparently content to leave him alive, unconscious and crippled on the ground. She kept his club but didn’t take his clothing. The cold and rain didn’t seem to bother her.
Then she looked at me.
In that instant, I knew I was looking at The Pale Witch. I looked into her eyes and I couldn’t fucking move. I understood what she was straight away and the sheer terror of it froze me. The Pale Witch isn’t a shtriga, she isn’t a gorgon and she isn’t a succubus.
The Pale Witch is a cambion.
It’s hard to put into words exactly how paralysing the sight of a cambion is. That perfectly serene face and those dead, staring eyes just don’t belong on a body that’s otherwise human. It was like looking into the face of a mannequin and knowing that it’s looking back at you.
“Hmmm?”
That noise again. That kind of detached curiosity shouldn’t exist in the world of predator and prey, might makes right, survival of the fittest. Nobody in the city of Dis has any right to make that noise.
She took an awkward step towards me and I saw that her right leg was broken. It seemed that her fight with the resident had injured her after all, she just didn’t notice it. She tried to walk normally, completely unaware that one of her legs had an extra joint. I don’t care how tough you are, nobody should be able to put their full weight onto a broken leg without even wincing.
“Hmmm?”
She stepped closer. Her zombie shuffle steadily closing the gap between us as I stared at her. She raised her club and my survival instincts finally kicked into gear. Her transfixing spell broke just enough for me to stumble backwards and avoid her swing.
I ran.
I ran from a woman with a broken leg and I’m not even ashamed of it.
Looking back on my experience, there are some things I just can’t comprehend. The Pale Witch is a cambion, I’m certain of it. She was born in Hell and Hell is all she’s ever known. She also looked to be about thirty years old. That just shouldn’t be possible.
No baby survives long in Dis. Even if they had a tribe to protect them, there just isn’t enough nourishment for an infant to grow into a toddler, let alone an adult. The Pale Witch is a walking impossibility. Her existence is a defiance of all reason.
I would endure every torture the people of Skin Street and the Boneyard could conceive of if it meant I would never have to look into her eyes again.