Cross snapped the reins. The hound galloped the short distance of the island and leapt off into the abyss. At the crest of the jump, Cross flung himself off the saddle and glided across the chasm, reaching for the narrow ledge. He dropped faster than anticipated and snagged the ledge by the tip of his fingers and dangled.
The hellhound tumbled into the pit of Hell, howling. Spirits in the pit latched onto the hound and pulled it down further. Corpses swam in the pool of lava. They were themselves made of fire. The pit belched flames and consumed the souls in it. The souls in turn ingested the belched lava. The fires of Hell weren’t meant for killing, only maiming and torturing and the foul stench of charred flesh suffocated him in the oppressive heat.
The spirits screamed at Cross and berated him. They told him how much they hated him and how envious they were that he hadn’t joined them, how he deserved the same torment. They taunted him with threats that he would soon suffer just like them. They would drag him down and keep him forever. They even chastised each other and pulled one another down into the pit as each tried to escape their own fate. The ones who weren’t held back began to climb towards Cross.
He clambered as fast as he could up the jagged wall. The rock carved into his palms with each grip. He fought through the searing pain and willed himself to keep climbing. He neared the summit, but the slits in his hands had widened and enflamed with pain. He could no longer pull himself up without feeling every slice in his palms.
The spirits latched their miserable arms around his legs, the bottom of his slacks burst into flames, and they yanked him downward. He stomped their faces and crushed their skulls. But more of the Hell spirits followed.
He was just about to give up when six hands grabbed him from above, hoisted him up and patted out the fires on his clothes. He coughed the smoke out of his lungs. The draggles stood over him, blinking the eyelids behind their big black eyes.
How they could have lifted him so easily? Even though there were three of them to carry his load, they were as thin as starved children, almost made entirely of bone, and they weighed nothing. He sat up and patted them on their brainy heads, trying to avoid squishing the tender zones or getting a prick from their horns. His palms were mush and soaked in blood.
“Thanks,” he said, bandaging his throbbing hands with strips of his shirt sleeve. The cloth quickly soaked up his black blood. His fingers felt fat and numb, and his palms scorched as if he was holding a ball of flames. Pain was something he had grown accustomed to though.
“So, you’re the draggles, huh?” he asked his saviors.
Their innocent faces tilted above their stringy necks like a dog listening to its master, but not understanding the command.
“That’s just what I call you because I don’t know—you can understand me, can’t you?”
They hopped around in place like bunny rabbits.
“But you don’t talk.”
All three of them spun around in a circle.
“Why do you keep following me around? Did my mother send you?”
They hopped up and down and then proceeded to sniff him all over. They seemed just as curious of him as he was of them. One of them examined the obsidian blade, poking his claw through the hole in the center.
“The Raven said there were five of you, but there were only four of you before the hellhound—” He stopped himself as the three remaining draggles drooped their sad little faces downward. Something must’ve happened to number five when he wasn’t around. Their misfortunes were all his fault. Bad things always happened to everyone who had the even slightest connection to him.
“That’s too bad about your friends.” He stood up and brushed himself off. “I should’ve—it’s all my fault. If I had—you just take care of yourselves, okay.” He walked a few steps along the river. Their claws pittered behind him.
He stopped and turned around. “You saved my hide. I saved yours. We’re even. You’ve fulfilled your oath. Stop following me. I don’t know what Mama promised you, but you don’t want to be friends with a hard case like me. You seem like nice creatures, and this sort of thing with the hellhound happens to me every day. You don’t want none of that. The three of you should git.” He paced forward. They followed.
“Git!” he yelled and waved his hand at them, threatening to hit them. “Go on now. I ain’t your pops. Scat!” He tossed stones at them.
The creatures crouched down and scurried away around the crusty cones that formed the pits of Hell until they were out of sight. He didn’t want to be mean or scare them or even hurt them. He even missed them already, but they would face less danger on their own then hanging around him. Then again, they lived in the underworld, where trouble lurked in every nook and cranny. Poor innocent creatures.
INSIDE THE COLOSSUS-HAIRED HUT DIAMOND TOOTH LAY WITH MNUBOTU, the portly leader of the Nwa-Efé. He and his concubines had been rocked asleep by the motion of the colossus. The blubber-lipped chief smacked his tongue in his sleep and smelled of armpit sweat and cheese.
After all his propositioning when they first met, he never once laid his fat hands on Diamond Tooth or his concubines. He only watched her fornicate with the other women.
Through the hut’s window veil, Mount Mictlan bobbed. She slipped her newly manicured fingers into her bagh nakhs and strapped the gloves on. Mnubotu awoke.
“This is where I get off,” she said to him.
“I thought you already did that,” he said with a sly grin. “Why don’t you stay? Forget about mountains and such. You’ll be treated well. We have food and drink.”
Diamond Tooth smiled and glided a finger down Mnubotu’s chest. If the hetaeras took over the colossus, then maybe after she discovered the location of the Toran, she could get a free ride directly to it as compensation for freeing the whores from their slavery.
She traced around the area where his main arteries would be and stroked around the vital organs. sish. She injected the tiger claws into his chest.
The hetaeras screamed. Diamond Tooth closed her eyes and basked in their horror. Mnubotu wilted to Nothing. The dark stains spread around the hut.
The women backed away to the wall in the rear of the hut, covering their naked bodies with their arms. Guards outside the hut banged knocked on the door, speaking in their native tongue.
“You’re all free now,” Diamond Tooth said to the women. “You can take this colossus where ever you want.”
Madam Mnesarete stepped forth, scrunching her glittery eyebrows. “Who ever said that we desired freedom?”
“No amount of perfume can mask the scent of enslavement. I should know. I’ve mastered quite a few souls of my own. It gives off a lovely—” She swirled her hand through the air, “—spicy essence.”
The guards banged on the door, yelling in the native language of the Nwa-Efé. Madam Mnesarete responded back to them.
Diamond Tooth raised the tips of her tiger claws to the madam’s eyes. “What did you just say to them?”
Madam Mnesarete stared at the blades undaunted. “Why would you help us?” she asked.
“I didn’t help you on purpose,” said Diamond Tooth. “It’s not like I care about your freedom. I got what I wanted already. I just thought you’d do the same.”
“You should never have done this.” Madam Mnesarete grabbed the bagh nakhs and lowered them away from her face. “I told the guards that the screaming was just us getting a little too excited and we shouldn’t be disturbed again. But when you leave I’ll have to inform them of what happened. I’ll give you a two minute head start.”
“Sorry to cut and run.” Diamond Tooth packed food for her journey, snatched up her bundle of clothes, and stuffed it all into a sack. She threw on the tribesman’s fuzzy colossus-haired coat. It weighted her down and was potentially itchy. With her face hidden behind the veil in the hood, and the sleeves covering her hands, she fled out into the oven outside.
Waves of heat sparked all around the coat like tiny explosions, but she remained unscathed
, protected by the colossus hair threaded within the coat. She raced through the jungle of hair to the rear of the colossus and rolled the ladder down the beast’s hind leg. The ladder reached less than halfway to the ground. It was bone shattering height if she jumped.
Tribesmen yelled behind her. Her two minutes were up. They had obviously been informed about their burned leader.
She gripped the ladder on both sides and slid down to its end. The ladder bounced on the back of the colossus’s thigh as it took its wide-legged steps, knocking her about. Her knuckles smashed between the ladder and the stony body of the colossus, but she held on.
The tribesmen threw javelins down at her. She leaned to the side, dodging three of them. The javelins ricocheted off of the colossus and never penetrated the rock-hard beast. Two tribesmen pulled the ladder upwards while others continued to launch javelins her way.
They wouldn’t stop the colossus just to capture her. It was in their best interest to keep the colossus moving at all times. She had to jump. Before the leg of the monster jutted out to form the ramp she had anticipated, she cut the ladder knots above her head.
She slid down the colossus’s leg on the wooden rungs, and in seconds, slapped the jagged ground, rolling. A javelin stumped into the ground near her face. Another spiked at her side.
Two tribesmen tumbled off the colossus and splattered to the rocky ground. The hetaeras shoved two men more off the beast. They crunched to the ground burned like the others.
The red flames in the sky changed from hot red to blazing blue for the first time in months. They lashed downward like whips.
The ground quaked.
The hetaeras pivoted their focus to the south. She copied their gaze just in time to see the glorious Inferno awaken. It spewed angry lava into the already scorched skies, filling it with an even more depressing reddish-blue gloom.
Cannonballs of flame launched out of the volcano and flocked eastward like migrating birds. They touched down in the vicinity of Limbo.
The colossus picked up its pace as if spooked. It marched away into the west, carrying the Nwa-Efé tribe with it.
The air thickened with ash on the rugged outskirts of Xibalbá where she stood in awe of the Inferno’s wrath. She changed out of the impractical, skimpy outfit and back into her own clothes in preparation for the treacherous journey through Metnal to Mount Mictlan.
Four crossroads attempted to lie to Diamond Tooth about which direction they would take her, but she could find north with her eyes closed. All anyone had to do was follow the fishy stench of squals.
The desolate north road, made of white stone, took her straight into the black mountains after several periods of sleep. Squals howled in announcement of her presence in their territory, and upon her first step into Metnal they flooded out of the darkness without hesitation.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t just allow me to pass on through,” she said to them. “I could use a little target practice.”
They ambushed her from all sides, tumbling down the jagged mountains recklessly, with no regard to the wellbeing of their emaciated bodies.
Delightfully, she bombarded the swarm with a stream of daggered tiger’s claws from her bagh nakhs. The blades pierced through two and three squals at a time. It was a lovely day.
Handfuls of the miserable souls leapt off the mountain. Her tiger claws plucked them out of the air. Hundreds more poured out from every dark crevice of the mountains and enclosed her. There were way too many. She couldn’t take them all down by herself.
Immediately, she toned down her confidence and how much fun she was having. She took down the few squals that blocked her path and retreated through the hole she created.
Hungry jaws clapped behind her. Claws scraped against the mountain rock in the shadows. She dove into the river that bordered Mount Mictlan like a moat and swam for her afterlife.
The squals were excellent watch dogs for Mictlan, but were too vile to be accepted inside the realm, so the ancients had forbidden the squals from crossing the river by Divine Law. Diamond Tooth hoped that was still a practice now that the deities were all gone. She climbed out of the water and found the squals lingering on the other side just as she had hoped.
“We will wait,” said each squal at once. “We. Will. Wait.”
They meant it. Even though their scrappy nature gave them an impression of impatience, she knew personally from her old friend Forfax about the undying patience of squals. Forfax had waited hundreds of years to retrieve that ring from Rowings and wasn’t afraid to con her, of all demons, into getting his filthy claws on it. Squals had hunted many chosen souls across all the realms endlessly until they caught that soul, and they always caught their prey eventually.
There was no other path she could take on her return. And there would be no way around the squals. Her only path of escape would be through them and she was certain they’d be waiting, way more than she would be able to handle. Thinking about it threw her off her game a little.
She pushed those negative thoughts away and continued north until she arrived at a set of mountains that were joined together as if in ageless battle. Each mountain shoved against the other in a struggle for supremacy, leaving a narrow crawl space for travelers to pass through.
She wormed her way through the tunnel for an hour, and that entire time their blood, sweat, and tears showered her, threatening to bury her under rubble forever. The obsidian mountain known as Mount Mictlan awaited her on the other side.
Besides Niflheim, Mictlan was the farthest north any known civilization had ever settled, and the inhabited realm rested somewhere up that mountain. It was known to be a frozen kingdom locked in burning ice.
She couldn’t gauge the length of time it would take to climb it. Its upper half vanished into the red clouds—the murky flagellants of the Inferno, many miles away now. Ancient tales of conquerors told of weeks spent on Mount Mictlan before reaching the summit, and they were expert climbers with equipment and were aided by objects of the dead.
Clem Balfour would have a great head start if she didn’t find him with the woman Manauia. He was a brave soul, making such a foolish journey. Manauia must’ve been very important to him for him to go to such great lengths to reach her. That indicated the traits of a man who would do anything to get what he wanted, a trait they shared—which only reinforced her determination and commitment to track him down.
He knew the location of the gate that would lead her out of the underworld, and he’d be looking for the astrolabe that unlocked it. Their fates were aligned. They were meant to meet. The obsidian mountain beckoned her to conqueror it for that reason alone.
She wrapped the coat she had stolen from the tribal leader around her body and prepared herself mentally for ice that burned just as bad as the heat generated by the incinerating sky. She tugged her two coats close at the neck and began working her way up from the base of the mountain.
She ascended parts of the mountain on foot. Dry ice sizzled on the soles of her boots. But the climb was mostly a hand over hand deal, with the slippery volcanic glass at her breast and a spacious vacuum to her back.
Within the first few hours of climbing, the tips of her fingers turned grey and her hands were numb to the rock in her palms. She lost all the feeling in her hands. The glossy nail polish chipped away and sprinkled off into the wind. Black blood oozed out of cuts in her hand and froze.
She ate biscuits on rest periods, nesting at bases and in the crevices trying to avoid the snap of the wind and dry ice storms. Rest periods were few and far between and never seemed like rest periods at all. They were more like a waste of good climbing time, but she’d die a second death trying to climb every single day without rest. Resting was smart.
The further north she traveled, the weaker the flames in the sky became. The air grew bitterer, but not in the way that gave her any pleasure. Not even the colossus-haired coat kept her warm enough.
Her shivers grew worse every day, but coldness was the least of her
troubles. Her nerves rattled with every pull up. Her legs pulsed with every step. She couldn’t sleep when she needed to or even lay down without aches and pains in her body screaming at her to get up. Nor could she stand up straight without sharp bites twisting in her stomach.
The least little noise tortured her ears. The tap of her boots against rock provoked her to seriously consider chopping both her feet off. Vomiting became an everyday occurrence—sometimes multiple times a day—and she began to lose track of her sleep cycles.
She actually preferred paradise to the Mictlan. Maybe not. She considered it. By the time she breached the red clouds, her fingers themselves had turned cloudy and she could hardly recognize them with all the cold burns and blisters.
She forgot how to count them. They trembled as she desperately tried to remember what number came after three.
“One, two, three…” The next number eluded her. “One, two, three…” She got stuck again.
“Four,” said a voice.
She spun her head around, side to side and found a smudge on the frosty canvass. A Nothing clutched to the snowy rock. It squirmed as if it were alive. She stared in disbelief and blinked in an effort to fight the hallucination.
Nothings never spoke or moved. They were nothing after all, only remnants of a shell of a forgotten soul who had died twice. It was the worst state of being. She’d rather have been born a squal than to ever be a Nothing. Being a Nothing wasn’t being at all. It was just there, hollow and ashy, sucked dry of anything resembling life. It definitely couldn’t have spoken. The mountain was screwing with her head. It wouldn’t have been the first time the underworld had gotten into her mind.
She turned away from the Nothing and gazed out into the grey clouds which blanketed the underworld from her perspective way up on the mountainside. A dark splotch swirled over the area where the Inferno would be. That blemish twisted, and the clouds opened like a curtain and uncovered the mountain of fire. She sat up amazed at the view, but assuming she was still imagining things that weren’t actually happening.
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