I don’t know how long I walked on the spikes. Time here is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the rhythm of pain. My screams became whimpers, my whimpers became a constant, silent prayer for it to end. It did not. It only changed.
The ground softened. The spikes receded, and I fell forward onto a surface that was blessedly flat. For a moment, a single, foolish, human moment, a wave of relief washed over me. Then the heat hit me.
I was in a desert. An endless, rolling expanse of fine, black sand under the same dead, twilight sky. The air itself was a physical thing, a furnace blast that scorched my lungs and made my eyes water. The sand wasn’t just hot; it was alive with heat. With every step, it clung to my skin, raising blisters that would weep, burst, and then instantly heal, ready to be burned again. It was a torment of a thousand tiny fires.
“You were always so angry,” a Yamdut’s voice rasped in my head, its tone a dry rustle of ancient leaves. “So much fire in your heart after your father died. You burned everyone who tried to get close. Now, you can burn on the outside, too.”
He was right. I remembered the simmering rage that became my constant companion. The way I would snap at my mother for no reason. The bitterness I felt towards my friends whose families were still whole. I had nurtured that anger, fed it, let it grow until it was a bonfire inside me. It had felt powerful then, a shield against the pain of my grief. Here, it was just another instrument of my torture.
A new agony arose, one that dwarfed even the fire. Thirst. A desperate, clawing need for water. My throat was a desert of its own, cracked and raw. My tongue was a swollen, useless thing in my mouth. I would have traded my soul for a single drop of water, but my soul was not mine to trade. I begged. I pleaded with the Yamduts, my silent voice a pathetic croak of desperation.
One of them stopped. I could feel a shift in its attention, a flicker of something that might have been amusement on its monstrous, indistinct face. It produced a long-handled ladle, its bowl filled with a beautiful, shimmering liquid that caught the dim light. Hope, a stupid, stubborn weed, grew in my heart. It was a trick, I knew it had to be, but the thirst was so absolute, I didn’t care.
He brought the ladle to my lips.
I drank.
It was molten copper.
The fire of the sand was a child’s campfire compared to this. This was a liquid sun consuming me from within. It incinerated my tongue, my throat, my stomach, turning my entire being into a hollow, screaming shell of pure fire. The pain was so complete, so all-consuming, that my consciousness flickered out like a snuffed candle. For a blessed moment, there was nothing.
Then I was back, whole again, the memory of the fire still blazing in my mind. The thirst was still there, perhaps even worse than before. And the desert stretched on, endless. I had received my answer. In this place, even the promise of mercy is just another form of pain.
Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise
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