With further attention to the Thorn’s quills we saw that they would sink into the flesh of the damned not far passed their tips, and the flesh they pierced would fester and become puss-filled as soon as the Thorn’s quills would exit the wounds. Eventually these wounds would heal and since the damned cannot die in Hell, only suffer; they would always have more of this to look forward to.
The job of the Thorn is as never ending as the supply of souls falling to Hell. The landscape is under continuous flux as construction and changes are always being carried out to fit the whims of Hell’s ruler.
One such whim Judas had pursued was to have a lake on this landscape. The Thorn set forth to change the land in such a way that the blood from the wounds of the damned would flow to a certain place in Hell not far from the throne. Slowly, over time, the level of blood rose to create the Great Crimson Lake, as so named by Judas. The lakebed is comprised of the damned who are perpetually drowning in the blood of the other damned. Judas even had to create special Thorn to work perpetually in the lake. They make sure the basin expands as needed by adding fleshen souls to it. Those damned spend their existences perpetually drowning in the blood of the other sinners.
Judas was not finished with his landscape yet, however. The Thorn Minion would always be working on the ever-expanding realm, but Judas knew the physical sufferings of Hell would be only part of a greater damnation. For the sake of absolute suffering his next addition to Hell is to add not only aesthetics, but also yet more suffering.
Journal entry IV
The screams of Hell’s new landscape seem near deafening, except for very rare moments when the inhalations of the damned sync up, and for those rare moments even a graveyard makes more noise. This will always be a dramatic understatement, but Judas easily became accustomed to the extreme noise of the damned. He could even here how their screams and cries ebbed and flowed because of the undulations of the semi-flaccid, cylindrical shape of Hell spinning slowly within the Shadow of God. These movements in the landscape also caused changes in the gravity making time itself unstable and unpredictable. Judas stood from his throne of twisted, contorted, and broken bodies; oozing blood and puss and sporting snapped and cracked bones protruding from all over, and he admired the architecture of his own design.
“Fuck that carpenter!” Judas whispered to himself as he stepped away from the throne and stood upon the protruding ledge of the throne’s pedestal. Judas raised one hand before him and bowed his head in concentration. A rolling wave of the most pure silence starting at his feet swept the brutal landscape. It was one of the very rare times Hell was ever silent.
Judas rotated his outstretched hand palm up and strained his fingers to reach out and stretch as far as they could. Soon new pains boiled from within the bodies of the damned. A rolling wave of anguish initiated and erupted from within all the fleshen souls. They cried out as their bodies became spastic and gyrating violently causing all of Hell to convulse wildly. Then, from the groin of every man and woman, a thorn bush sprouted and grew wildly; thorns the length of fingers pierce outward from within their most tender flesh and bloomed into a bulbous, thorny shape with an open center over the lower belly of each of the damned. Then, from each fleshen body, the sin-blackened soul seeped from their mangled and tortured flesh like some tar-like mass, and it became ensnared on the thorns within the open center of their respective thorn bush. Whereas the flesh could be tortured in so many ways, so now could the souls be tormented with all of the emotional fallout of every sin and transgression committed in life. There in the thorns of its own body the soul is laid bare and vulnerable to suffer openly. Now every one of the damned truly suffers body and soul.
Journal entry V
All this creation, as dictated by the adopted son of Satan, took some time, and there was still yet more to learn. Satan had explained to Judas that here, as in the other realms of Heaven and Purgatory, emotions are no different from the tools that mortals use to construct, create or destroy. Love can be used no differently than an artist’s paintbrush in one person’s hand, or as a destructive instrument in the hands of another. Hate can be used no differently than a torch to burn down a forest or to keep others warm. Happiness can quench a thirst or drown someone who has none. Judas understood these examples were simplistic at best and now hungered to know the full extent and complexities of the entire spectrum of mortal emotions. He walked the new land for years searching out what bits of these emotions he could still find in the souls of the damned and, quite literally, Judas played with their emotions. He experimented with them. He abused them and he nurtured them.
After some time Judas took a particular interest in emotion of Rage. He sought out those souls whose coffers contained the most Rage and collected it from the damned while making sure to leave enough to let it reconstitute within them. Judas balled the Rage up into a popping, flaring, spinning, fiery mass. By the will of Judas the Thorn Minion tore strips of flesh from the fleshen bodies they stood upon. They held the flesh close to the fire of Rage and allowed it to dry and become porous. As per that which Hell was created for, even though the flesh was torn from the damned, they still felt not only the pain of the flesh being stripped away, but they also felt the torn away flesh being burned, because no suffering goes wasted.
The Thorn repositioned many of the arms and legs of the damned throughout Hell to be outstretched upward into the air. They locked the limbs in place using the bones, muscle, and tendons of damned. After drying the strips of flesh and repositioning limbs all over hell, and by the will of Judas, the General of the Thorn Minion silently commands his ranks to open their veins and let Judas’s blood be absorbed by strips of flesh. Once drenched, and starting with the General, those closest reach into the flaming sphere of Rage and ignite the flesh. The lumbering General turns to a surrounding crowd of Thorn Minion; each with blood-drenched ribbons of mortal meat wrapped around the tips of their quills. The Thorn General ignites the strips of flesh on several of the other Thorn, and then those Thorn ignited the next in succession, and this process went on until the entire Thorn Minion, stretching all throughout Hell, was carrying the flame of Rage at the end of their quills.
All throughout Hell new notes and tones of screams flooded the air as the fleshen torches became ablaze with fire wrought from Rage itself. The flaming strips of flesh still on the quills of the Thorn were then wrapped onto limbs positioned for the purpose of becoming Hell’s torches. Now the original owners of the strips of flesh and those whose limbs now served as torches shared in the pain of Rage’s flame.
Hell now had a form, heat, and light, and a ruler to watch over it. Satan’s grin embraced Judas as they surveyed the work done and the ongoing work being performed by the tireless and unwavering Thorn Minion.
Now every body and soul of the damned, save Judas, is splayed open, naked, raw and in a perpetual state of torture.
Now Hell has a landscape of engineered suffering and utilitarian function.
Now Hell has light and warmth wrought from yet more suffering paid by the damned.
What was once a hell is now the Hell.
“Now, Judas, there is but one final task which will complete your work and solidify your place as ruler of Hell. In the mortal realm the will of God is being spread by both the spoken and scribed word. You know the value and capabilities of the human soul perhaps as well as I do now. I believe it is time you scribed an alternative to the word of God as well as create the means by which to obtain that alternative by mortals.”
Journal entry VI: Creation of The Book of the Damned. My creation.
The twisted pillar the throne sits upon bends down under the will of Judas allowing him to step from it. The people of whom the great pillar is comprised work as a series of knuckles and joints as they twist and stretch despite their tortured condition. Judas reaches out to one of the thorn bushes before him, and without receiving any scratch or punctures in his translucent skin he puts his hand and forearm through the layers and rests his palm
upon the soul trapped within the thorn bush’s center. Its blackened mass cringes under his touch and he smiles. The transgressions contained within the coffer of this soul reveal themselves to him. Judas doesn’t need to be in contact with these blackened souls to see their sins and transgressions. He could simply look at them with his red, glassy eyes and peer into every secret they ever held, but, when he is in physical contact he can also feel the torture they’re receiving from reliving their sins repeatedly from the perspective of everyone who was affected by the transgressions committed.
The area of Hell in which the throne sits is now permanently well lit by a massive orb of flaming Rage. Judas had commanded the Thorn to place the chaotic sphere in the center of the gravity generated by the shape of Hell. Being cylindrical, despite the pillars built to brace Hell’s shape, it does still flux from round symmetry to oblong at various points along its length. This burning rage will always be Hell’s own sun and yet another tool with which to torture the damned.
Judas walks to an area where new souls are herded for processing into the landscape. Thorn Minion of every size, shape, and configuration are working away like ants curating their colony; great, big, thorny ants. From there Judas passes to one of the two gaping and slowly undulating Hellmouths. Here the force of Satan, which surrounds Hell, guides all the new souls falling from their Earthly existences. The Thorn General, as always, stands nearby Judas awaiting a command. Other Thorn are also present, but stationed there to impale the new souls and hand them over to carriers, as Judas once called them. The Carrier Thorn do not have very many of the smaller quills, but they do have many longer quills which are very well suited for having half a dozen or so of the new arrivals impaled at one time, per quill, for transport to the processing area. One Carrier Thorn in particular is so well suited and so massive that it’s capable of carrying up to sixty souls at one time all impaled one on top of the other on its various quills.
However, Judas was not interested in the ongoing activities of his minion. His interest is in new flesh wrought from the freshest memories of life lived, but which are not yet tormented by Hell’s many surprises.
Judas gazes into the dark shadow of God, quickly glancing from fleshen soul to fleshen soul, trying to choose just the right one to start with, and finally one catches his eye. A young man whose transgressions included a multitude of deviant violations against women of all ages and children of both genders. Every one of them ended in a gruesome death he would cry over for days afterward. During those days his remorse would calm, and then dissipate entirely while he profusely promised himself he wouldn’t do it anymore. For a time he would stay true to his promises to self, but always there would be another temptation into darkness with just the right look, or tone of voice, or scent of hair and tender skin.
He’s a strong young man with a muscular build made from hard work, which he used to work his victims hard. He traveled considerably taking jobs on various farms or for livestock markets when the nomads brought in a herd. Often it was through these dealings when he would typically find his next victim, or victims. He was always gone by the time the transgressions were discovered, until his reputation finally preceded him. He met his fate by being thrown into a cave-dwelling colony of not just rapists and murderers, but rapists and murderers who were infected with wet leprosy and kept under tight guard. Laughable that this male’s fleshen body is as when he was fit and strong rather than reflecting the effects of the leprosy, but it doesn’t matter here, nor will it matter ever. Now this naked, frightened, boy of a man is in the hands of Judas. I’m quite certain he would prefer the leprosy and other infections to this new fate. Judas doesn’t give the overgrown boy time to react, nor is Judas concerned over the young man’s preference of fates.
At the will of Judas his Thorn General lunges forward and impales the man like a pitchfork into soft hay. The General then throws him down on the fleshen ground where the young man’s pain and fright of his new surroundings culminate in girlish screams of terror mixed with bloody gurgles from his wounds. He’s pinned to the flesh below him, face to face with another fleshen soul who’s already sewn into the landscape; both are spitting blood all over each other’s faces while screaming for help, and from the pain of their predicaments, but this is not a place where help from the suffering may be found.
Judas stands over his victim and kneels to get close to his face as his glossy red eyes drink in this brute’s contorted expressions. A mild euphoria comes over Judas just as he plunges his talon-clad hands into the sides of the man’s torso; slicing through skin, muscle and bone from pits to hips. The euphoria is that of creative inspiration.
Judas then slices with just one talon, across the back just above the shoulder blades. The young man’s head falls limp against the damned soul under him with a wet thud as Judas’s claw severs the spine. Then Judas pierces the back just above the hip and drags his talon across to the other side; the young man’s legs fall limp as Judas severs the spinal cord there as well. In one brutal motion Judas tears a long portion of spine and ribcage from the body of the young man. Screaming from the brutalization of his body this male was tossed like a rag doll to a Carrier Thorn nearby. His wounds will heal only to endure new ones being created.
Judas’s talons pass easily through the ribs as he carves away the excess on each side; the shoulder blades are tossed and what he considers an appropriate length of spine is preserved with the ribs still intact. Once formed to his satisfaction Judas lays the carved bone and cartilage aside and sets out to find the next ingredient for this next creation.
Fresh from the world of the living, I am the next one to catch Judas’s interest. Me! A cantankerous, caustic, crabby, curmudgeonly cunt of a foul-mouthed old woman! My whose history I will not go into, but just as with the young man, I’m also impaled by the Thorn General and brought before Judas for him to pick from me what he’s interested in. I do not believe I’m what he expected from a woman of such advanced years. I’m uneducated and my mouth overflows with steady streams of profanity, insults, and language which would make any of the sea traders of my day blush with embarrassment ... or become sexually excited. DOGS!
It appears Judas is amused by my tenacity, judging by the salivating grin stretching across his face. Not for a moment do I let show my physical distress, nor do I allow a hint of my despair though it boils over, but he knows just the same. Without saying a word to me he raises his hand and extends his index finger to the side of my forehead. I feel his claw sink into my skin; a sensation not unlike a red-hot blade slicing a path around the edge of my face. He quickly peels my face from my skull and throws it atop his coveted remnant of spine and ribs. The Thorn General tosses my wrinkled old carcass to the Carrier Thorn. I try to continue my slurs against him, but the pain has finally become too much, and it’s really rather difficult saying fuck you without lips!
The third to be violated by Judas is, to say the least, different. She is beautiful, raven-haired, young – perhaps late teens or early twenties at the most – and a harlot as stunningly beautiful as she was deadly during her mortal existence. She also became a bit of a mystery within the ranks of Hell, but again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
This mysterious visage of a woman is named, Leila. I remember it for reasons I have yet to explain, but primarily she stands out because Judas shows her mercy and has an obvious infatuation for her. Even at a distance, off in Satan’s darkness, Leila’s physical beauty caught Judas’s attention; her long and lithe form seemed graceful even in the cold blackness of God’s shadow. Her black hair, near indistinguishable from God’s shadow save the light of Hell reflecting off it, seems to gently whip around her, occasionally masking her face except for her piercing pale blue eyes. Leila’s form is toned and strong, even a touch muscular; beautifully symmetrical and not overly endowed in any way; not in height or proportion. She is almost strangely physically perfect.
Leila had been raised in an incestuous family where there was a lot of mental, emotional,
and physical abuse. Though Leila seemed to know from an early age, if she simply submitted, she would escape canings and lashings, which would cause her permanent scarring. Yes, she's always been well aware of her unique beauty. Though she believed abandonment to be wrong because of the preaching’s of her parents, she ran away from home and lived on the streets, in abandoned homes, or in the company of anyone who was willing to barter her physical charms and assets in exchange for a warm bed and a meal. Leila knew well how to please the sexes because of the chores she endured at her parents’ and siblings’ behest. But Leila was not to live this mediocre freedom for too long as her family had hunted her down.
They took her from the domicile of a gentle, older couple who had taken her in for the evening out of sheer kindness. Leila’s family members had entered the house in the predawn hours and subdued the older couple while binding and gagging Leila. They made her watch as her would-be hosts’ throats were slit.
At a camp, not far outside the town, Leila and her family stopped to gather their things and disappear before the couple they slaughtered were found. Leila struggled free of the poorly tied constraints and found herself a large cleaver in her mother’s cookware. None of her family members knew she was free and armed as one by one she slit their throats while they were making ready for the journey home. Her father was the last since he was out rounding up several sheep brought along for food and was not very close to the camp. He barely felt the cleaver’s blade splitting the skin of his throat. Instinctively he went into shock as some part of his mind was already admitting to him what the rest of his mind was denying. He panicked as he drew his hands to the gash and felt his own blood pouring out uncontrollably. At first it was just a dull sting, but as he realized the extent of the cut; the nerves in his skin, tendons, and muscle all fired off in his brain and signaled the true pain of his wound to become obvious. Leila knew it was wrong to do this, but she was enjoying it too much to stop watching. While he was still barely conscious of his daughter’s presence she split open his clothing and castrated him. She held his manhood before his eyes as the life finished pouring out of his body.
Legacy of Judas - Book One Page 3