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~The Infernal Realm~
The landscape was not a physical place, not really. It was guilt made permanent, a wound in reality that wept fire and lamentation, each landscape a unique tapestry of horrors.
Lakes of bubbling sulfur stretched to a bleeding horizon, their surfaces broken by the thrashing limbs of countless souls. The air was a thick soup of heat and despair, ringing with a never-ending chorus of screams. Each cry was a note in a symphony of agony, conducted by the very geography of damnation.
Three figures held court on a jagged obsidian plateau overlooking the most populous of the fiery lakes. They were titanic in their horror, concepts of transgression given foul and magnificent form.
Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, was a mountain of pulsating, glistening corruption. His body was a seething, swollen swarm of fat black flies, each the size of a human fist, their constant drone the baseline of this realm. A putrid, greenish liquid dripped from the churning mass, sizzling where it struck the rock. He had no face, only a shifting vortex within the swarm that served as a focal point of his boundless gluttony and spite.
Asmodeus, the demon of lust, was a beautiful and terrifying tapestry of torment. He appeared as a twisting, swirling column composed of thousands of translucent human faces.
Each face was frozen in a different stage of ecstasy or agony, mouths perpetually open in silent screams or moans. The faces melted into one another, their features blending and separating in a nauseating dance. From this column extended slender, graceful limbs that ended in claws like polished obsidian.
Mammon sat as a statue of avarice. He was a colossal figure forged from what seemed to be solid, polished gold, sitting upon a throne of fused coins and gemstones. Yet the perfection was a lie. Fine, hairline cracks webbed across his golden form, and from these fissures seeped not light, but thick, dark blood. A low, discordant symphony of screams and the clinking of counting coins emanated from within him, the sounds of eternal, unsatisfied greed.
"Ah," rumbled Beelzebub, the drone of his flies layering his voice with a thousand buzzing echoes. "The music. It has been particularly rich of late. The despair of the newly arrived... it has a certain pungency. A fine vintage of suffering."
His comment was met with a ripple of motion through Asmodeus's column of faces, a wave of silent laughter. "They always scream loudest for the first century," the demon purred, his voice a harmonious blend of a hundred seductive and furious whispers. "Before the numbness truly sets in. It is the hope leaving them that makes the sweetest sound."
The pleasantries of torment concluded, the atmosphere grew heavier. The flies around Beelzebub buzzed with a more agitated frequency.
"Our legions diminish," the Lord of Flies stated, the statement dropping into the infernal air like a stone. "The losses are not trivial. They are catastrophic. This... Shaper. This upstart weaver of threads. His mortal agents, these 'Ascended,' wield powers that should not belong to them. They bind our lesser kin, they dispel our manifestations, they cleanse our footholds. For the first time in millennia, we are losing ground. We are being hunted in the world above."
A golden fist clenched on Mammon's throne, the sound of grinding metal and bone echoing. "The faith supply dwindles," he intoned, his voice the sound of a landslide of coins. "Fewer possessions. Fewer contracts. Fewer souls ripe for the picking before they ever reach the mortal afterlife. The churches grow fat and happy, their workload lightened. Those sanctimonious pricks. My stores grow lean."
He leaned forward, the bloody cracks in his form widening slightly. "What is our Lord's plan? What does Lucifer say? We cannot simply endure this attrition."
Asmodeus sighed, a sound like a breeze through a field of weeping willows. "What can he say? What can he do? The Seal of the False Master remains. The Gates are shut by the Betrayer's hand. The higher echelons are trapped here, forced to project but a fraction of our power into the mortal plane. We are hamstrung by the chains of the false god, laid down by the very one who cast us down for refusing His yoke."
A particularly agonized scream from the lake below punctuated his sentence. A soul, a man who had been a brutal warlord, momentarily found the strength to raise his blistered face towards the impossible sky. "God! Almighty God, forgive me! Have mercy!"
Asmodeus turned his swirling column of faces towards the pit. A single, elegant clawed limb extended, growing to impossible length.
It gently, almost tenderly, tapped the soul on the head. "There is no God here," the demon whispered, the words dripping with venomous hatred for the very title. Then the limb shoved the shrieking soul back under the molten surface.
He turned back to the council, his whispers sharpening. "But our Lord is not idle. My feelers remain in the world. The whispers from the profane chapels, the corrupted monasteries... they speak of a ritual. A grand working. Lucifer has found it fit to create a crack, a flaw in the prison the False God built. He seeks not to break the Seal, but to... circumvent it. Temporarily."
Beelzebub's swarm seethed. "A temporary escape? To what end? Even free, he would face the combined watchfulness of Heaven and the new pantheon."
"To create," Mammon said, his cracking voice thoughtful. "It is always about creation with Him. The great adversary. The grand rebel. He cannot stand the order, the new order most of all. He would burn it all from spite."
Asmodeus gave a nod that sent his faces into a swirling cascade. "Speculation runs rampant, but the most persistent thread... is the Antichrist."
The word hung in the sulphurous air, seeming to draw the very flames higher.
"The one thing the False God cannot abide," Asmodeus continued, his whispers gaining a fervent, eager edge. "It would be a direct challenge to the false prophet's faith. He would become a false messiah. A dark mirror. With so many mortals primed by their own scriptures to believe in an apocalypse, the being who steps into that role... the faith would be instant. It would be catastrophic, and it would be powerful. It would grant a dominion over the concept of Apocalypse itself; it would be the very antithesis to the false God."
He leaned in, his column of faces compressing. "The theory is this: if Lucifer can sire or craft the vessel and initiate the prophetic chain, the reaction from the heavenly host would be automatic and overwhelming. In the chaos of that confrontation, the metaphysical rules may be able to be bent."
Beelzebub digested this, the buzzing of his flies settling into a low, ominous hum. "A gamble. It was a gamble. To use the false gods' own dogma as a lever to break our chains, as expected of the Lightbringer."
"Just speculation, of course," Asmodeus purred, though the hunger in his thousand voices betrayed his hunger for revenge and bloodshed.
Mammon's golden head tilted, producing a sound of stressed metal and a scream of tormented souls. "And this Shaper? This abomination of a mortal made God who hunts us?"
A ripple of pure, undiluted hatred passed through Beelzebub's form. "Let Lucifer handle the abomination. Once the Architect is undone, his little ascended toys will be defenseless. I will personally peel the flesh from their bones, slowly, over millennia. Their screams will make this current music sound like a lullaby."
The three lords of sin sat in their infernal council, surrounded by the endless screams of the damned, and nursed their hatred and their desperate, speculative hope. Above them, in the silent vaults of a reality they could no longer fully touch, their enemy continued his work.
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