Dark Aeons

by Z. M. Wilmot

  Hell Factory

  The cherub of sleep fell up and away from me as the burning pain jolted me awake. I opened my bleeding eyes and slowly sat up. My few moments of rest had been blissfully divine, which made my awakening all the more painful. The metal cot – if indeed it could be called even that – I had been lying upon quickly heated to the temperature of an erupting volcano, and I yelped as I rolled off of it onto the rough, sharp obsidian of the floor.

  I grimaced as the black stone of midnight scraped against my raw, smoking flesh, but did not make another sound. My yelp alone was enough to bring them down upon me.

  Three piercing points of pure agony manifested themselves on my back, and I collapsed as the waves of torment shuddered through my body, speeding along my back and stopping to linger at my heart and my eyes. My vision went red and then black as a wave of blistering heat cracked my dehydrated eyeballs open. I could feel what little moisture remained in them pouring down my face like tears of pure pain.

  “Grzlt mbrkl!” came the command from behind me, through a voice like the devil’s claws slowly screeching their way across a chalkboard. By now I understood the command, but my memory failed me, as it always did. In this place, nothing could be relied upon except pain.

  The three points of agony came again in the same place. My body was not inured to the pain; no matter how much punishment it endured, every stroke of the lash or stab of the trident was worse than the one before. I collapsed onto the jagged obsidian and let my mind go, screaming and thrashing in a vain attempt to relieve myself of the torture. But my mind was always clear; that was the real horror. There were no defenses to hide behind, no ways to block out the torment. There was nothing between myself and the pain.

  With my convulsions there came no release, and then the hellwhips descended, their flaming lengths arcing across my body, delicately wrapping themselves around me and then roughly twisting away, tearing off hunks of burning flesh as they did so.

  They eventually stopped, and with it stopped much of the agony. One cannot appreciate torture fully if one is constantly in anguish; brief moments of reprieve make the return of torment all the more terrible.

  As I lay sprawled in a pool of my own burning blood on the obsidian floor of Hell, my wounds began to heal and my eyes reformed in their sockets, and soon I was whole again, covered with a new layer of tender and raw skin.

  Wishing to avoid more pain, I scrambled to my feet, cutting open my hands, knees, and feet in the process. “Chzrt rkltq!” I obeyed the command, turning about and walking away from my white-hot metal sleeping bench, past the grotesquely obese black imp in charge of my torture. Its glowing red pitchfork was lowered menacingly, and its impish eyes glimmered evilly. A flicker of red in its hideously elongated mouth, lined with razor sharp, glimmering white fangs, told of the serpentine tongues that lurked within.

  My speed earned me a jab in the shin with the pitchfork, and I nearly collapsed again with the pain. I remained upright, though, and the imp giggled and jabbed me again. The second stab was enough to send me down to the floor, and the punishing hellwhips descended once more as the imp laughed, snorted, and giggled madly.

  When it stopped and my flesh was once more whole, the imp prodded me to my feet and gently stabbed my back with the trident. I stayed upright, and this time a second jab did not follow. I was led out of my private torture chamber through an iron door and out into the blinding light. The floor outside was a rough pumice that scoured my feet as I trudged along its length. I was on a narrow walkway, and on the opposite side of the glowing iron door to my cell was a thousand-foot drop into the center of a pool of bubbling magma. The screams of those who had tried to end their torment by a fall into the blessed oblivion of fire sounded in my ears as loudly as if I was there among them. There was no escape from the pain; it was everywhere.

  I did not wish to look down into the maelstrom of heat that lay below, but a blow to the side of my head from the blunt end of the imp’s trident caused my head to turn and look, and I saw the mangled and twisted victims of the unlucky escapees swirling in the eternal fires of Hell below, doomed forever to burn and roast beneath my feet. The magma was dotted with millions upon millions of bodies struggling in the fire, and I knew that below the surface were even more lost souls, constantly drowning in the unimaginable heat.

  “Grtl vtfg!” I walked to the right, passing other iron doors, walking slowly and gingerly in front of my personal imp. The heat from below began to wane, and suddenly became cold. Had I glanced back down, I would have seen the magma become a cold blue liquid, the transition from heat to cold shattering many a body. Of course, the body would reform quickly, and the pain would never leave them. The constant change from molten magma to liquid nitrogen would have been unbearable, and I was glad I did not have to suffer down there.

  That thought earned me a whack from the imp that almost sent me tumbling down to join those below. “Hgrf wqrpnb!” Not even my thoughts were my own. My body, my soul, and my mind were all in the possession of the imp, and through him, the Torment.

  I fortunately maintained my balance and hurried forward, trying and failing to ignore the constant scrape of rough stone against my bleeding and burned feet. Other damned souls shuffled forward, prodded on by their own personal imps of every shape and size. It had been made very clear long ago that speaking to our fellow lost souls was not only impossible, but also would be punished harshly. Even eye contact was forbidden, and I dropped my head to the uneven floor as I approached the line.

  Elevated obsidian paths jutted out of the narrow ledge outside our prisons at semi-regular intervals. Rows upon rows of personal prisons extended above and below us, and similarly countless obsidian paths were being walked upon all around me. Even thinking of my fellow prisoners was enough to earn me a scrape on the ankle, the pain of which I stomached with a terrible grimace.

  I joined the line heading away from our prisons, over the sea of endlessly churning magma, seamlessly, which pleased my imp so much that he decided to brush my spine with his trident. I collapsed to the ground and was rewarded with a thorough beating with the point of the trident, from which I barely recovered. For having delayed the progress of the line, I was prodded forward again, and barely kept my balance as I scurried forward like an animal to make up for the lost time.

  After an eternity of walking on the gritty bridge between our prisons and what lay before us, I finally found myself on a plane wider than three paces. The plain before me was bordered on two sides by tall, black mountains, from whose darkened tips poured a never-ending cascade of molten rock, feeding the swirling liquid down below. The plain itself was covered with a dull grey mixture of pebble and sand.

  It is a long road that leads to the Factory, to my place of terrible slavery. It lies in the center of the plains between the mountains, at the end of a long, well-trodden road. No matter how many times we trudge across the grey plains to the great Factory, shards of broken glass always pierce our feet, and we walk forward in the blood of other lost souls, adding our own to the mix.

  Even our personal imps seem subdued every time we approach the factory, their poking and prodding becoming less sure, their pace slower. We have nothing to lose and trudge ever on forward, towards the glittering factory of obsidian that lies before us.

  The Factory has the appearance of a perverted and desecrated cathedral, its tall towers and looming spires marred by untold aeons of smoke and fire. Where stained glass windows would have graced a cathedral, the Factory instead has hideous smokestacks, belching out a continuous stream of foul brimstone.

  The great doors of the Factory were pushed open as we approached, a pair of gargantuan, satanic satyrs acting as doorbeasts and guardians. They stared down at our trailing line with amused malice, occasionally selecting a helpless victim and swallowing him – or her, as it often was – whole. I did not envy them; they would spend eternities sloshing about in the bellies of the mighty satyr, drowning and burning in the most powerful of aci
ds, until they emerged in the beast’s feces, which were in turn used to help fuel the terrible factory…

  I averted my gaze from the inner walls as I passed by the satyrs untouched. Those whom the satyrs take never return, but if one looks carefully at the walls of the Factory, he might recognize their screaming faces staring back at him in horror, having become a part of the architectural abomination.

  Our imps had by then left us. They never come into the Factory, for fear of joining our ranks. A new imp will escort us back, and a different one will wake us up the next day; the same imp never appears twice, and we always are returned to a different room, so even our sense of familiarity is gone.

  Save for that which comes from the Factory. The Factory is constant and unchanging. In the untold epochs during which it has existed, it has never changed. I have seen the mountains that surround it grow, rising up from a terrible, twisted forest, and I have seen even the plains change, their solid obsidian surface long since gone, but the Factory remains as it was when I first saw it, with boiling red clouds filling the skies above it.

  Inside the factory, massive cauldrons hang from chains on the ceiling, filling the entire place with the rancid smell of rotting feces and decaying corpses, emanating an eerie red glow. The entrance hall has many shadows, and they all watch us hungrily as we march through the room into the next, through a single large doorway.

  And so our work begins. It has been a long while since souls flowed down into this place from the dead, and so the soul chutes themselves remain rusted and unused, hanging high above us like unused pipes. Hellish spiders dwell in their vast lengths now, and those few unlucky enough to work beneath one often find themselves taken by the horrible beasts and pulled away into the terrible darkness above, where they are imprisoned forever in the spiders’ sticky webs, their innards torn out every few minutes for all of eternity.

  Forges line the floors of the factory, as far as the eye can see in all directions. Physics long ago had ceased to apply to us. We walk forward and fill in the forges as they become available, as we always have done, and pick up our red-hot hammers, ignoring the seared flesh they cause, and hammer away at whatever appeared on the anvil before us. Our overseer begins to prowl among us, a terrible lupine beast who stands on five legs and bears flaming whips in twelve arms. He is everywhere at once, watching us with his deadly septet of eyes, and those who fall behind find themselves missing several layers of skin in a matter of moments.

  Many unfortunate souls around me lost their skins this day, but I myself worked as hard as I could. Sheets of metal appeared before me, and I hammered them all into swords, shields, whips, scythes, sickles, carpets, tapestries, boots, and whatever else needed to be made as the images appeared in my mind. I tried as always to distance myself from the work, but the leering face of the overseer kept me focused on my torture, his eyes seeing into my very mind.

  There had been a time, once, when the soul chutes functioned, and a stream of souls from up above would pour down to us. Where the chutes themselves led I could not tell, as the Factory appeared to be unconnected to anything save the ground. But come the souls did, and it had been our duty frequently to sort them; some were to be tortured, some bound into weapons and armour, and others sent to join us. We had been the lucky ones.

  But the souls no longer came. Perhaps our Factory – for surely there were many more – had merely stopped receiving them, or perhaps the world above had ended. It did not really matter which; my world would never end. It just kept on going and going, and always would. Who would have guessed that a small piece of rotating metal, flying through the air at great speed, would be all that it took to send me here. I had bled out on the cold, rainy streets of the big city, and then had tumbled down a terribly long metal passage, eventually coming out of one of the soul chutes. I had been chosen to work in the Factory, and in that very moment my new life of torment had begun.

  I did not know why I labored, nor could I ask; the imps would not answer my questions, and a stray word to a comrade would send me flying down to the waters below. My hard labor in the Factory earned me at least some reprieve occasionally from the agony of Hell, and if I lost my privilege I would be in even greater torment and constant pain.

  There had never been any chance for us. I had prayed every day, made the proper offerings and sacrifices, and believed in God with all my heart. I had given what I had to those who needed it, and I never did anyone wrong. And then a stray bit of metal ended it all, and sent me down here. There wasn’t a better place. There was only here, this damned place where the satyrs and the wolves and the imps funneled the souls of the dead for their own nefarious purposes, to torment us and make us do their labor. And we are powerless to stop it. There is nothing we can do. Life above was hell. Life after death is Hell. It is inevitable.

  I shriek in agony as my skin leaves my soul’s body, and I collapse to the floor as the lupine overseer, his eyes gleaming red with sadistic pleasure and terrible malice, whips me again and again, tearing me apart completely. My thoughts are not my own. I am a mass of organs, connected only by the sharing of a common pain. My soul slowly starts to pull itself back together as the overseer throws back his head and laughs, his whip of flame ready to repeat the punishment. I cannot resist, I cannot run, I cannot hide.

  There is no escape.