The Pleasures of Hell 01.014

The door opened. Mia jumped back and did her best to look casual. She failed.

Zel stood there, a smile on her face, with three large, metal rod things in her grip. She had more than enough hands to wield them.

"Little soul, have you..." Slowly, Zel's smile faded, and she tilted her head to the side as she glared down at her. "I told you to work on breaking the beast, not seducing him."

"I uh... I tried, but..."

"Your ability to arouse demons is of little use to me. Your potential is in your ability to control and manipulate." She took a step toward Mia, and aimed one of the metal rods at her. Her face had changed. "Do not misunderstand me, little soul. I did not give you a request. I gave you a command. If you do not obey, I will see if I can force you to obey." With her free hand, she gestured to one of the black rods. An amber stone sat on the end between sharp prongs, glowing with light, and radiating heat.

"Sorry! I'm sorry, I just... I got distracted, and--"

Zel walked up to Mia, hips swaying, each step emphasized by her hooves. Slowly, she crouched down in front of Mia, and gestured she come to her.

Mia hesitated. Mistake. Zel snapped out her free hand, grabbed Mia's wrist, and yanked her forward. The look in the beautiful demon's mask-like, smooth face shifted from calm, to icy, and stabbed a dozen holes through Mia's guts. She raised one of the amber-tipped rods, and brought it within an inch of Mia's face. Hot hot hot.

"These are tools of the spire. This one, I can use to seal the call of the horde, or other desires I summon from the spire, should I need the spire's aura to last for some time within my soldiers. This one"--she brought up another rod, tipped with amber again, but larger, no sharp prongs--"can summon the power of the spire's desire in a small area. This one"--she waved the other one, a shorter rod covered in spikes and tipped with jagged blades--"is something the previous queen crafted. Valzanal."

"Valzanal?"

"Indeed. One of the most powerful fujara tetrad. She held Death's Grip for thousands of years before her death in the Spires War. She was an avid fan of torture, as well. She hung people upside down and let them drown in their blood, and she danced in the dripping crimson. She raped men using her sin, often to death, and she ripped women in half from the crotch up. She..." With an almost happy sigh, Zel tapped one of the metal rods against her hip. She liked what she was describing, or at least liked the idea of a woman in charge doing that sort of stuff. "If you explore the tunnels around and beneath Death's Grip, you will find the monuments Hell grew in her honor."

"Wait, what? Hell grew monuments?"

Zel grinned, but it wasn't the flirtatious, playful kind, not anymore. A part of her seemed to be happy with the memory of her predecessor. Another part of her seemed to dance on the precipice of getting angry with Mia.

"Hell listens, young soul. She listens, and on the waves of her existence, the vibration of her music, she plays her song. The flesh, the stone, the blood, the bone, the metal, the sky and fire and the incinerating heat of her embrace, they bend to the song."

"I... don't hear any song." Mia gulped. Vibrations. Music. Maybe she did hear a song?

Her words definitely earned a frown from Zel, though. Maybe she'd been hoping Mia could.

"Not a literal song, soul." Oh, never mind. "But yes, Hell adapts to the things she hears and feels. Monuments to Valzanal show her statue, and include the remains of slaughter and pain. Skeletons, some real, some grown by Hell, litter the tunnels and speak of the pain she wrought. The cries of her victims scarred the flesh and memory of Hell for thousands, and perhaps for the next hundred thousand years or more."

"Scary."

With an increasingly wicked, angry smile, Zel pointed the rod with the sharp tip toward Mia's face.

"The demons and souls I have skewered upon the spikes at my door are but a small taste of the respect I pay Valzanal. And there is one thing, one thing specifically, that draws my ire and asks me to bring Death's Grip back to the days of the Third War, and the pain Valzanal brought."

Uh oh.

"I--"

"To be ignored!" Zel stood up quick, and Mia jumped back with a squeak as Zel swung the weapon. Mia covered her head, but managed to see Zel turn from underneath her arm. With a shriek of rage, Zel stabbed the weapon into Vinicius's gut.

The leash Zel had used yesterday on Vinicius seemed like the worst torture Mia could imagine. She was a moron. Vinicius tried to outright scream, an animal, alien sound, but the chain wrapped around his snout stopped him from opening his mouth. The half roar half scream muffled between pinned teeth, the chains rattled as every limb fought for freedom, and his muscles bulged with futility. His tail shook, his wide eyes stared to the ceiling with blind agony, and his spikes and horns rubbed against the metal wall behind him hard enough to leave deep scratches.

Zel yanked the rod out of the beast's gut. It dripped with blood, and a hole the size of its tip remained in Vinicius's stomach, oozing red that boiled, not burning but somehow sizzling. With a snarl and death stare, she pointed the drenched tool toward Mia, and the blood on its amber tip steamed.

"If you do not take my orders, every one of them, as if they are a matter of life and death from now on, I will teach you what this tool of Valzanal's feels like, little soul, and you will wish for death each and every day until I am satisfied! Understood?"

Mia lowered her hands, forced her eyes away from the tool, back up to Zel's face, and swallowed down the barbed rock in her throat.

"Understood."

Happy smile returning, Zel nodded, and gestured to the bleeding beast.

"Now, let us try again. These tools will help." Her voice had changed, too. From rage and hate, back to fun and almost flirtatious.

"Are... Are they all torture tools?"

Zel waved around one of the other tools. "This one is unique. It will force the will of the spire, my will, my order, upon his mind, and it will torture his mind to do it. I will use it, and you will use your aura. Now."

After a heavy nod, Mia reached into herself, and looked for the aura she'd found earlier.

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~~Day 25~~

~~David~~

"They were here," Caera said. She dragged her claw on the ground hard enough to make a scratch. "Near Adam's Back. Renato might still be there, spending his days and nights doing nothing but fucking."

"How's he keep everyone fed?" David asked. He sat beside her, the two of them in their armor and drawing a really shitty map in the stone using the tiger lady's claws. A shitty map was better than no map.

"Lots of humans getting dumped into Hell regularly. We'll probably see another portal open up soon. At least one has already, nearby. They come and go pretty quick."

He nodded. The portal that'd eaten him and his sister had shown up pretty damn fast, and it'd lasted in the sky, what, a few minutes? Then it'd vanished.

"I wonder how many times it drops humans off in Hell as a whole. Over fifty million people die every year, and--"

"Fifty million?" Caera asked, raising a black eyebrow. Not really an eyebrow, so much as a darker patch of skin that looked like an eyebrow, but it fit the part. "How do you know that?"

"I looked it up once."

"Why?"

He blinked at her. "Why not?"

She blinked back at him, before laughing and shaking her head.

"Okay, so, fifty million a year. How many of those people you think deserve to go to Hell, to die here, and then spend dozens, hundreds of cycles being tormented and killed over and over as a remnant?"

"I don't know. Maybe one in twenty?"

Caera laughed again, but it had a darker sound this time.

"You think one out of every twenty people go to Hell, and the other nineteen people go to Heaven?"

"I mean, yeah?"

Jes sat nearby, wings pulled around in front of her so she could clean them with her claws. And of course, she paused her grooming routine to laugh at him, complete with a pointing of the tip of her tail.

"You really overestimate how good people are, David. So many humans, so fucking many, are absolute shits. And I don't mean jerks who are just apathetic or mean. I mean real, absolute shits who would let you drown for five bucks."

He returned her laugh with a sad frown. "Come on, humanity isn't that bad."

"We don't have information to prove it," Caera said, "but, down here, the idea is it's... a lot higher than one in twenty."

"Yeah but you're in Hell," he said. "More humans coming to Hell means more food, so I imagine most demons like to think humans are coming down here in droves, right? Pretty biased."

"Sure. But you don't think you're being naive, too?"

"I don't know."

She tried to smile, but it faded into a tired sigh.

"Remind me to show you in the scrying pools."

"What, they can show how many people are going to Hell?"

"No, but if you ask something like 'show me someone in this area committing murder or rape or torture', it'll show you. You won't like what you find."

He winced. "No... No I guess I wouldn't."

The room grew silent. A peek over his shoulder showed Jes and Dao looking his way, listening, and while Jes had her usual 'yeah the surface sucks too, get used to it' face, Dao's softened into a sad frown. She crawled over to him, sat behind him, spread her legs around him so she could snuggle into his back, and hugged him. She wore no armor, but wasn't aroused either. Firm breasts pressed to his back, borderline hard, but the skin was soft enough they reminded him of a well worn, comfortable leather couch made of real leather. A strange feeling, not exactly sexy, but a sports bra wouldn't cut it considering how much jumping around and fighting demons had to do. Firm, nearly black skin worked better.

"For the love of Lucifer," Jes said, "stop babying him! He gets sad for one second and you're mother henning him."

"You know..." He laughed, shaking his head. "How much scrying pool do you watch to know what mother henning is?"

"I dunno. Human speech kinda bleeds over into Hell 'cause of them, and all the demons watching them, and... shut up."

Rolling her eyes, Caera pointed back at the ground, and drew some scratch marks indicating the inner and outer shore of Hell, this time more toward clockwise. She drew some mountains and valleys, too.

"This is where we fell." She tapped a claw between some lines. "Here's the Gorzen Eye. Here's Adam's Back." Her claw slowly moved further clockwise. "Here's where Renato was hiding, last I met him. If we need somewhere to hide, after we kill Diogo and get Mia, he might be able to help us." She tapped on the opposite side of her map. "Here's the border between Death's Grip and the Black Valley." She tapped on the other side of the map again, closer to Renato's hiding spot. "Here's where Kia, Marquez, and I were ambushed."

"If this is to scale, that'll take a couple weeks of solid trekking to reach. But the border with Black Valley is closer, maybe half that distance." And it was on the Black Valley border they expected to find the Damall. The two goals were in opposite directions.

The tregeera nodded. "We'll have to make a choice on which to do first."

David held his two hands in front of him, palm up. "On one hand, we might learn more about what's trying to kill me, and all the crazy shit going on, if we go look for the Damall. On the other hand, I owe you my life. I said I'd help you and I will."

After a strange deep purr, almost like a crocodile rumble, Caera slipped her big tail up onto his lap, and left it there. So of course he did the only reasonable thing. He put his hands on it, and worked his fingers between the spikes that lined its top.

"I've been looking for a way to kill those Cainites for years, David. I can wait a few extra weeks."

"You sure? That doesn't sound like very demon behavior."

She hit him in the stomach with the tail he was doing his best to massage.

"Plenty of demons out there who'd prove you right. Be happy I'm not one of them."

"I am I am!" He rubbed his belly. If she'd turned her tail to do that, she'd have skewered him.

Dao, with her chin on his shoulder, rubbed a horn into the side of his head as she rubbed his belly, too. She chirped and clicked a few times, and whatever she said earned a hearty laugh out of Caera.

"We," Jes said as she moved onto the next wing to prune, "are nice demons."

Dao clicked into David's ear. No need for a translator. Jes wasn't very nice. He struggled to keep from laughing.

"I don't know what other demons are like," he said, "except for what you three have told me. But, you three have been a huge surprise. I keep getting confused, because you got me terrified of other demons, like those imps and grems I met on my first day here. They looked ready to rip out my heart and dance in the blood."

Caera grinned at him, and poked him in the chest with a claw. "And you'd take three of those demons to Heaven with you?"

"Well, I mean, you three aren't like that. You've been... well... I mean, you know."

"I knew your sister for less than a day," Caera said, "but I could tell she was a lot better at talking than you. What happened there?"

Sighing, he looked down and managed a slow, weak shrug. "If we didn't look so much alike, I'd figure we weren't related."

"You're definitely related. You're both stupid nice in your own weird little way."

"We are?"

The tiger lady nodded, leaned in, and set a quick kiss on his lips.

"Yeah. You are."

The satyr still hugging him from behind chirped and clicked, nodded and rubbed her chin on his shoulder, and rubbed her horn against the side of his head. After kissing his cheek, her arms slipped around him, and undid the knots holding his half breastplate.

"Hey."

With a mischievous grin, Dao pulled on his shoulders, turned him, pushed him onto his back, and chirped. Before he could so much as agree to the inevitable, she straddled his legs, pulled off his leather skirt, and left him naked.

He barely noticed when the girls were casually naked anymore, their skin usually dark red or black, and super firm like leather, with vaginas closed and nipples flat. After being around that so much, his brain started treating their black and dark red skin as clothes. He, on the other hand, had no such skin. Humans were soft, and now that he was naked, he felt very exposed. Just a week ago, Jes and Dao hadn't let him wear clothes at all, but now he was used to them again.

Smiling down at him, the satyr lowered herself onto him, and lay on him. Her breasts, firm and hard, grew softer and softer by the moment as she touched noses with him. Nose touch turned into a quick kiss, and a tiny lip lick, too. All he could see of her from this close was the flat, black bone of her forehead and the two giant black ram horns coming out of it, joining the two horns coming out of the higher parts of her skull.

"Dao, just because he apologized and explained doesn't mean you should throw yourself at him," Jes said. She crawled over and sat down beside him. "Yes, I know. The pipsqueak is nice, but that's no reason to pamper him so much, you slut."

"I don't know," Caera said. "I never thought an unmarked soul would be so enjoyable to be around." Nodding, Caera sat down on his other side, and grinned down at him as she licked her big teeth, usually hidden inside her mouth. Normally her mouth looked perfectly human, if maybe a bit cat-ish on her very short snout, but sometimes she opened it wide, and exposed how big it really was, and how sharp her teeth really were.

"Enjoyable?" David asked.

"Humans are fucking assholes," Jes said. "We told you that."

"I get that, but--"

"We're used to being on our guard around humans." Jes gestured to Caera. "For obvious reasons. Most of the time they're just as bad as the worst demons. Sometimes they're not, but even then, they're not... They wouldn't have apologized like you did." Laughing, Jes lay beside him, and pressed into his side. She was getting redder and softer too, and far as David could tell, his aura wasn't doing anything at the moment. "Or, you know, admit to being a dumbass."

"I uh... I'm not very good at the... words thing."

Laughing, Caera took a minute to undo the straps of her armor. Naked, the huge tiger lady did the same as Jes, and lay next to him, opposite the gargoyle.

"I think I got a good analogy from the surface. Most humans down here are like coyotes. Assholes that will bite you in the ass and steal your food if they can get away with it. Sure, sometimes you can coexist, but you always have to be prepared for when they try and fuck you over, run away, or whatever. You're more like a dog. Maybe a golden retriever."

He blinked at the tiger as she leaned in and nudged her nose with his, literal inches from Daoka's face.

"I'm a dog?"

"A nice, cuddly dog," Jes said.

Dao clicked a few times, chirped a few more, and slid down his body a ways before lying down again. She set her cheek on his chest, and sighed happily as she rubbed the side of her curling ram horn against his pectoral. Either she was listening to him breathe or his heart beat.

"Not sure I like being compared to a golden retriever," he said. "Especially with all the sex."

Jes laughed, louder than she probably should have, and gently headbutt his shoulder with her forehead.

"Dude, the scrying pool shows the internet, too. Catgirls are all the rage everywhere."

"That... is not the same. I think. And I don't think that was an accurate description of coyotes either, Caera. You--"

Caera kissed him. She kept her eyes open, grinned at him as she kissed him, and her giant tail slithered over and rested on his legs. It wasn't long before a second tail joined it, and the two warm, heavy limbs gently wagged back and forth over his shins and knees.

"I--"

"In Hell," Jes said, "it's pretty normal for demons to fuck their pets. Pets being betrayers. But you, you fucking stupid little moron, are opposite of one of them. I can cozy up to you, and... relax." With a softening smile, Jes put a claw to his chin, pulled him away from Caera, and kissed him.

He didn't say a thing. Were demons just... starved for some positivity in their lives? Or at least, not negativity? Was that the reason demons were all so violent? Christ, where was Mia when he needed her?

Dao came in again, kissed him again, and slid lower. And lower. And lower. The girls had to move their tails as the satyr slipped between David's legs, got on her stomach between them, and guided his dick up and onto his abs.

~~♥♥♥~~

With a satisfied nod, Dao got comfortable. She snuggled in between his thighs, her arms up and over his legs and near his hips, and her breasts squashed down around the base of his increasing length.

"I uh, didn't think my aura--"

"You weren't using it," Caera said. "Not like demons -- or humans -- need an aura to get horny, right?"

"I mean, I guess. But--"

Jes kissed him again, chuckling as she did, before she lifted her head and tilted it enough to hit him on the skull with the side of one of her horns.

"Demons love humans, fresh meat. The succubi and incubi wish they looked even more human than they do." She traced a claw down his chest, and set her palm on his glans. "You're a hot little thing, you know? Even without the tetrad dick you have for some reason, and the aura, we'd still want to fuck you."

He blinked at her a few times. Demons liked humans that much?

Caera leaned back in, and dragged her long tongue along his throat. "I think you're hotter than a lot of souls. You died in great shape."

"Thanks... I think." The compliments made him blush more than the sensation of his thickening cock in Jes's grip and between Dao's enormous breasts.