<center><table width=600><center><b>Chapter 2</b>
Consequences
<td><td>
Peldurol was dumbfounded. He had not exactly realized the repercussions of his choice, until he was told by the devil himself that he was going to hell. Satan must have picked up on this, because he had begun to laugh heartily.
Slowly, the world began to reshape. It formed itself into a plethora of hallways. The hallways began interconnecting below him. Where all this took place, Peldurol could barely make out little things moving around down below him. The hallways turned from black and white to a velvety red color.
As he stared at the wonderous transformation below him, he noticed himself. His bady had slowly started reappearing. His heart began first. Just one cell started it off, but that cell begat another one. That cell had one more, and, before he knew it, his whole heart had become whole. After the heart came all of his veins. Millions of little tubes moved around in the air, stemming from the lump of lifeless flesh he calles his heart. His bones soon followed, creating form and shape from the one small organ. The Satyr’s nerves and brain, followed by the rest of his body, shaped, molded, and formed back into his body. His arms and a few vertebrae were missing.
‘Those are gone for good,’ he thought.
He wanted on the ground, now that he had form.
The ground obligingly rushed towards him. Peldurol landed with a thundering crash of hooves on stone. He looked at the surrounding area, taking in the sights. The walls were fleshy; they pulsed in tune with some unholy heart. It was like hell itself was one big creature. The floor was made of multitudes of bones sticking out through a fleshy skin. All of them were as dull as a tree branch.
Peldurol saw a few bags over in the corner. He sauntered towards them, his leg bones cracking from so much misuse. A stench entered Peldurol’s nose as he got nearer to the bags. It was the smell of fire… the smell of death… the smell of hell. The bags were made of flesh, and were connected to the ground by spindly cords of what looked like cartiledge. He kicked at one and the wall nearby slid apart with a sickening squish. A few seconds later, it closed with yet another squishing sound.
He got the idea of how to work them, and kicked the bag yet again. This time, however, he ran through the opening. The stench became worse than before. Extremely offensive to his nose and eyes. His trek continued all the same. He hoped to find Satan quickly, before anything happened to his beloved forest.
On Peldurol’s way through hell, he saw very many humans. There were almost nothing but them. He was glad. They all had horribly fatal wounds. Many were missing large portions of their body, or were ghostly white. A sign of decay. One man walked passed him, stab wounds all over his body. His left eye was missing, as was his left ear. Many fought over whose wound was better. A passerby reached over and ripped one of the men’s heads off.
“There, you win. Now shut the fuck up,” said the pissed off demon.
Peldurol couldn’t stifle the laughter from that. The other man in the fight noticed the laugh, and walked towards Peldurol.
“What the hell are you? Some sort of inbred goat?”
“No, I am not. I would also like to point out that I did nothing to offend you other than laugh at that other person’s misfortune,” he retorted.
“Oh, what the fuck. You can’t do shit to me anyway. I might as well have some fun.”
The man insulted him a few times, giving Peldurol a chance to look around at some form of quick escape route. He hoped what he’d chosen wouldn’t be necessary.
“If you’re done, I’d like to get going now.”
“Ohhh hell no. You stay right there, I’m far from done. Freak.”
His insults ranged from sexual preference, to his hybrid shape, and even to his mother. After that one, Peldurol began walking the other way.
“Don’t walk away. I haven’t gotten to the part where I fucked your wife.”
He stopped dead in his tracks.
Peldurol’s words came in short bursts, “What… did you… just say?”
“I said I fucked your wife!”
He knew he didn’t want to use the escape route he planned, but it could still be used.
“You’ll regret that,” said the enraged satyr, looking around the man’s back, and at a group of bored imps.
“Why will I re-”
He stopped talking once the hoof slammed into his chest.
The man flew back, breathless, into the group of imps.
They gleefully thanked Peldurol as they tore the man into many pieces, his screams of pain muffled by the walls. He smiled, said his goodbyes, and continued walking. He couldn’t help but wonder the sort of torture they’d give him after he was done on earth. Probably something involving hot coals and his ass. Maybe a permanent bath of lava with piercing screams all around him, driving him mad. He thought he’d worry about staying away from hell after he stopped the humans.
He continued through hell, kicking the fleshy bags to open doors. Along his walk he saw a large assortment of things. A beautiful woman, obviously vain, jeered at for her ugliness. She tore at her flesh, trying to make herself beautiful. Chunks of flesh fell to the ground, her fingernails scraping along her cheekbones at times. A few people in the crowd disappeared, others stopped laughing and heckling her. She looked around, and collapsed to the ground in pain and tears. One man was left in the crowd. She looked up to him, smiled, and they both disappeared. The room was left empty, puddles of blood already coagulating.
Peldurol cocked his head to the side in confusion, turned, and ventured on through the macabre hallways. His sight fell to other forms of hellish torture. Men who raped women were forcibly castrated, only to have their manhood regrow within moments. It was repeated over and over to the same man. A woman was forced to choose between her parents, spouse, or newborn. She’d had a miscarriage, and both parents were killed by a burglar. She could have stopped the man had she just been sooner, she thought. She chose the newborn to survive. Her husband vaulted himself at her, his head flying clean from his body as he did so, blood spattering on the baby. Her parents’ bodies exploded into pieces of gore that spewed across her. The bodies were stacked around her, just another wall to muffle her child’s cries.
Her husband and parents reappeared in front of her, and the almost dancelike procedure continued over and over, but the husband got noticeably closer each time; he finally got ahold of her, and he snapped her neck before his his head was once again ripped clean from his body.
Peldurol’s journey through hell continued on. His eyes venturing across the walls, he noticed how intricately woven the whole thing was. The bones were beautifully arrayed along the wall, seemlessly going together with the pulsating flesh and screams of pain and horror. It was a sight Peldurol would not soon forget. As he walked, the walls seemed to be more rigid than before, yet still pulsated a tad.
Peldurol passed an excrutiatingly foul smelling patch of air, and turned to see a room full of bodies. Young and old, male and female, it all blended together. Not all of the bodies were intact. There were limbs strewn about, disembodied and scarred. Many bodies actually moved. Peldurol could take no more, so he started leaving the room when the group of imps from before came walking happily by. They tossed the dead man into the pile, smiled at Peldurol, and left silently.
Peldurol chuckled and kept walking.
“Hey! It’s the freak!”
Peldurol stopped dead and stared forward.
“Why won’t you look at me? Too scary for the wussy,” the voice said.
He turned around and stared face first at the man from before. His head was tore up a bit, and his arms were almost uselessly limp.
“Hm… thought you’d die the first time I threw you at them.”
“Nah, here in hell you can’t die. What would be the point of the torture if you could die? I’ll always be here to fuck with you,” he smiled, “Y’see, whenever someone is dismembered so badly they cannot move, their body is sent to one of the many rooms around hell like it. Why I’m telling you this, I do not know, but I guess I should explain why I’ll be able to annoy the hell out of you forever. Anyway, after the day’s end, you’re reshaped, reformed, and sent back to your torture.”
Peldurol nodded and aimed his hoof at the man’s nose. He kicked with all his might, laughing as the man’s skull exploded into pieces of brain matter and chunks of bone.
“Vut thpe puck avv yoo doobin!?”
He laughed again and aimed his foot at the jaw this time, he kicked repeatedly, knocking the man’s jaw into someone’s back, making them scream in pain. His heart sank at this, for some reason. Blood spattered on his hooves and legs, he continued his leisurely stroll through hell.
A few hours later, Peldurol’s ears had become accustomed to the symphony of screams and laughs that were the trademark of hell. He actually quite liked the sound of the screams; it was almost soothing to his aching skull. Not to mention that his ears had stopped bleeding a little while back, and his mind had cleared quite noticeably. The only things in his head were the scheming to stay out of hell, and the nagging feeling that he’d forgotten something that was largely important to his life. He threw the latter to the back of his mind, focusing on the task at hand. He couldn’t concentrate on it good enough, so he brought the memories back to his mind.
He remembered when he turned 18, he broke his leg celebrating with his friends when he fell onto a tree. He was careless back then. His memories came back one by one. He remembered his broken heart, when his first girlfriend died in a horrible accident involving a lightning bolt and a tree. His first scrape when he fell. He didn’t remember if his mom comforted his crying, all he remembered was the pain it caused.
‘All these memories suck,’ thought Peldurol.
If he had memories of the bad, why not the good? He could remember his soul being taken from him, the faces of animals dying at the hands of humans, and the feeling of a lost love, why couldn’t he remember any of the good times he’d had. All of the good memories he thought everyone had. He got fleeting glimpses of happiness, but they faded, never to return to his mind again.
Peldurol stopped thinking when he walked into an enormous chamber. The room was beautifully decorated. Lava coursed through the columns that supported the greatly embellished ceiling and wall paintings. The painting on the ceiling itself caught his eye the most. It was a huge thing to behold. The colors were an array of almost every dark one imaginable. The painting was centered around a great winged creature the size of the planet, or so it seemed. The eyes of the demon glowed bright orange, and the bones shined through the coarse fleshy exterior. The wings were tattered, but seemed usable. There was a great shining hole in its chest that was completely black. It seemed to be in place where the heart should be. The face was contorted into a grotesque smile of insanity. The teeth were sharpened and craggily tilted in the mouth and were a sickly shade of black, of death. The neck slowly blended into the broad, strong shoulders with great meathooks for hands. They glistened with blood, and clenched to the point of veins popping out along the arms in streams of bluish streams on the orange body. The whole thing looked frighteningly real. Even the legs seemed to pound at the ground with ferocious intensity.
All while the awestruck Peldurol was staring at the ceiling, he hadn’t noticed the beautifully crafted throne at the center. Before he knew it, the ground began shaking uncontrollably. The floor buckled underneath his feet, and he ran to the nearest wall. He braced himself as best he could without arms. The painting above him began swaying back and forth, as though the roof were crumbling down upon him. What Peldurol didn’t expect was for it to start shrinking. He fell to the ground, but continued looking around him.
The creature became smaller, but still much larger than himself. It began having depth, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The ground shook less and less the more the demon came through, until it stopped completely. The great beast slowly floated seemlessly down to its throne, sat, and looked over to Peldurol. The smile had left his face, and his fists had clenched and unclenched many times in a row, like they’d not been used in a fairly long time.
Peldurol stood up and shook the dust off of him. The demon looked over at him and the smiled returned once again.
“Peldurol! You little bastard! How did you get here so soon? Shoulda taken much longer for you to get here,” said that all-too-familiar voice of Satan.
“It’s you…”
“Yes yes. That one guy that tore the hell out of heaven because he was a bit jealous of the throne. That guy that forces people to fuck things up. The guy that is the cause of every god damn bad thing in the world.”
“Yeah, you.”
“Well, what do you want from me?”
“I dunno, thought I’d get a bit of help here. Maybe a way back to earth.”
“You think I can just give you your way back up to earth? No. You have to fucking earn it and prove to me that you’re able to stand it up there.”
As the sentence was finished, Peldurol fell to the ground, writhing in pain. His empty elbows bubbled in pain, and his whole body burned. His body’s size fluctuated greatly due to the pain wracking his form. He blacked out shortly after it started.
Peldurol awoke what seemed to be a short time later to the sounds of agonized screams. Lucifer was laughing heartily at his condition. The screams sounded male, but weren’t the same ones he’d heard before. There was something familiar about them. He couldn’t move any part of his body except his eyes. The screaming was very close by, but he couldn’t see where it was coming from because of his inability to move. He couldn’t feel the pain anymore, but because he couldn’t move, he began panicking. The screams turned to weeps of sadness and loss. A tear escaped his eye and rolled to the floor. Satan stopped laughing.
“Aw, what’s wrong? Is the little baby scared? I thought you could handle this shit.”
Peldurol still couldn’t feel the rest of his body, so all he did was sit there and let the panic take him over. It slowly turned to fear and sadness, as is wont to lead to such feelings. The evil deity continued taunting the saddened satyr, as the disembodied voice cried along with Peldurol. He slowly stopped the tears, and the cries stopped as well. The voice continued taunting him. Once he stopped crying, the voice went back to its peircing screams of pain and agony. The screams began to soothe Peldurol into a slumber, his eyelids drooped and all became black.
Before Peldurol could completely sleep, however, the felling in his body returned. His eyes shot open and he began screaming in pain once again. He recognized the screams from before as his own. The agony from before had returned in full force.
“Make it stop,” Peldurol managed to blurt out. His throat had become unbearably raw.
“Alrighty. I think you’ve proven yourself to not be completely emotionless. Showing a bit of pussiness is always a good sign that you can be tortured,” Satan laughed.
The pain, for the most part, ceased entirely. There was still the lingering pain in his jaw and throat from the constant use of both.
“Why does my jaw still hurt,” his sentence was pockmarked by painful coughs.
“What the fuck do you think you get for screaming for two centuries. Time down here passes all too quickly for my tastes. Hell, took you five centuries to find your way here.”
“That means I’ve been here for damn near seven hundred years.”
“Seven hundred twenty three to be exact, actually.”
“What has become of my beautiful home,” the pain had faded enough that he could speak without too much pain.
“About that. I can’t tell you jack shit about the real world other than what god forsaken time it is up there. Not even the fucking weather can be told from down here.”
“Why?”
“Don’t ask. Too long of a story for me to tell you. About fifteen centuries long, and that’s before adding in how long it actually is in the real world.”
“Oh…”
“Aren’t we the little angsty bitch today.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what you’re thinking. You can’t possibly think you can really kill yourself, do you?”
“Well, not really, but it’d be fun. Anyway, can you help me get up to earth?”
“Sure, and while I’m at it I’ll send a few hundred dead fetuses up there with you. For fuck’s sake, you look like hell. You can’t go up to the world of man, who barely know why the hell they shit, and expect to be taken seriously without arms. God wouldn’t let me hear the end of it. Just hold still,” Lucifer shook his head in disappointment.
Peldurol stared speechless, and looked into Satan’s no longer smiling face. His flesh began to bubble wherever there had been a cut on him. His arms began to regrow, but something about them was wrong. They were almost like a thick gel more than flesh and bone. His skin tingled all over, cuts from rocks were being reshaped. Most of all, his face began stinging and moving. The boulder that hit there must have really screwed up his face.
“There, you have your arms and face, and your cuts have been restored.”
“What about my horns?”
“Oh, too late for that, but there is something I can do for those.”
His orange eyes flickered a bit and Peldurol felt a small bump form on his head.
“There. For every person you kill, you’ll get a nother little bump like that.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone. I just want them to stop.”
Satan scoffed at him, “Sure you won’t. Just follow me to the world of semi-chimps.”
Peldurol followed without uttering a word. They passed a few familiar rooms, and continued past many he had never seen before. Peldurol looked at the walls. They seemed to bend and twist towards his companion. All the pulsing was in sync with the pulsing of the black hole in Satan’s chest. Everything stopped when the two passed. Fights he had seen before he got to the chamber in the first place halted at their approach. One man’s torture was made worse because he moved his eyes upon Satan.
Peldurol felt extremely uneasy with everyone staring at them like they were. He felt their eyes moving from him to Satan. From his face to his arms, legs, which were no longer noble and beautiful. He had an inkling as to why they were looking. It had dawned on him that all Satyr must go to heaven. He was the first one they’d ever seen. They probably never even heard of them, because Satyr are generally nice, kind, and heaven-worthy creatures.
“Get the fuck back to whatever the hell it is you people do. I won’t have any screwing around when I’m temporarily busy. Once I get done with this one, you’ll all be getting some major ass kickings. This may not be heaven, but dammit, you still have to listen to what the fuck I say.”
Peldurol almost laughed at that. The irony of the statement almost hurt. he would have commented on it, but questioning Satan’s authority in his own personal domain didn’t seem to be the best course of action.
‘Yeah, I know how hypocritical that statement was. With my bad track record about respecting authority.’
Peldurol was startled, he gave a meek smile and replied, ‘Forgot you could do that. Extremely unnerving for you to be able to look in on my thoughts.’
‘You’ll either get used to it, or go mad. Either way suits me just fine. I’ve forgotten which happens the most.’
The juxtaposed duo continued along through hell. People’s heads turned and stared, still. Satan continued his threats of punishment wherever he went.
“I bet you’re wondering why I haven’t already scattered your fucking intestines from here to purgatory.”
“Kinda.”
“Thought so. Everyone is scared of me here.”
To assert his power, he grabbed one poor bastard by the neck, ripped his head off and shoved it ass far into his ass as possible. He didn’t stop there, though. He shoved his fingers through the man’s stomach and kidneys, into his eye sockets. Peldurol knew this because he saw one of the eyes stuck on Satan’s finger. The man yelled out in agony, muffled in his body. Satan threw the man’s corpse to the nearest wall, impaling it through the hole in the stomach on a bone.
Peldurol blinked and stared at the feat. He was surprised at how flimsy the man had become, even after being decapitated, anally violated by his own disembodied head, had one of his kidneys punctured, his eyes gouged out, and impaled through the stomach on a very dull bone.
Once he thought about it, Peldurol noticed that the bone hadn’t been there before. He finally realized one key thing. Satan is in complete control of hell’s shape. That’s why it bent and twisted towards the two, and why he was in a completely solid chamber, instead of out in the hallways. What he couldn’t figure out is why Satan was so surprised when he showed up. He had to have known how long it would take Peldurol, and the fact that he was probably guiding him all that way.
“You coming?”
Peldurol was jerked out of thought, “Yeah, I am.”
It wasn’t long before the two came to a large, hole in the wall. It was flanked on either side by large golems made of lava, held in shape by some unknown force. They moved to block the path of Peldurol, but they saw Satan and immediately moved away, kneeling to Darkness.
“Get your ass up there and finish whatever the hell you were going to do,” He said, motioning to the hole.
Peldurol set one extremely weathered hoof onto the bottom stair, looking up into the far distant point of light. He began his slow climb to the top, bidding Satan farewell. His hooves made loud clomps on the bone steps. There were carvings similar to the ones in Satan’s chamber.
After a few hours of climbing, the stairs slowly changed from ornate and beautiful, to half-assed and ugly. The symbols were less distinguished, with many ‘mistake etches’ marking the spots where the workers had obviously been too tired to work. A few steps above him there was a skeleton with a chisel in one hand, and a near completed step. The man had died before he finished it. He probably resided in one of the torture rooms in hell now.
The walls had also slowly been changing. The pulsating had slowed to an almost dead pace. The farther he went, the sicklier it got. It got greyer and less and less lifelike, until it was completely rock solid. He’d also noticed there no longer were steps, just a dirt path.
Peldurol finally realized he was going home. He became ecstatic and began running as fast as he could. He turned to see where he had been, but there was just a stone wall behind him. He turned around and continued running towards home; freedom.
After an hour or so, he came to a fork in the cave. It went back the way he came, but it was slanted upwards, rather than down. He decided to not bother with it, and ran faster, towards the light. His hoof caught a rock sticking up from the ground. He sent his hands out in front of him reflexively to make sure he didn’t injure himself further. He braced himself for the pain that would surely come.
It never came.
There was no pain in his hand, even though there was a deep cut along his left hand, and a huge rock through his right.
‘Man alive… I never thought someone would be as easily injured as you.’
Peldurol was annoyed, ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Hey, I was gonna help you, but if you’re gonna be a bitch about it, I can just revoke your earth priviledges by sending my golems after you.’
‘Sorry. Won’t happen again.’
‘That’s what I thought. Now, I gave you a little help with those arms of yours. Just think about them being perfectly new again.’
‘Uh… why?’
‘Just do it.’
Peldurol, confused, did as he was told. He imagined his transparent, but bloody, arms to be completely healed, and pictured the rock falling harmlessly to the floor. He closed his eyes and thought harder about it.
He heard a soft thud, and opened his eyes. His arms were back to perfect shape, and the rock was on the ground, no sign of blood at all. His arms rippled a bit, all the way to the elbow, and solidified.
‘Holy shit.’
‘Yeah, I know. I kick ass, you don’t need to shower me with affection over it.’
‘Uh… yeah. Right…’
Peldurol continued his leisurely run, without losing a step or a breath, towards the corporeal world again. With one great run, he’d come to the edge of the world. The sun was very bright outside, and he could see nothing of what was out there. He took a deep breath, stepped into the light, and into the world of man.</center></tr></td></table></center>
keep up the good work
Blood, violence, pain… what more could an evil dragon goddess ask for? I might even reward you for this glorious sacrifice 