CHAPTER 235: HELL

SOREN

I fell through darkness that had weight, had texture, had presence beyond simple absence of light. It pressed against my skin like water, like oil, like something that wanted to seep into pores and corrupt from the inside out.

The falling stretched longer than it should have, longer than the hole’s depth could account for, as though I had stepped not merely into earth but into somewhere else entirely, somewhere that existed adjacent to reality and followed different rules.

Then came the light.

Red-orange glow that started as distant pinpoint and expanded until it filled my vision, until everything was bathed in colors that belonged to forge fires and volcanic cores and places where mortals were not meant to witness.

Heat hit me like physical wall, like invisible barrier I slammed into at speed, and even with divine magic I felt the impact, felt my lungs seize as they tried to process air that was more fire than anything else.

The temperature was insane. Beyond measurement. Beyond anything I had experienced even in the worst of summer in Solmire.

This was heat that would have killed normal men instantly, that would have cooked flesh and boiled blood and turned bone to nothing before the body hit ground.

Stone walls surrounded me, glowing with their own light, veins of molten rock running through them like blood through flesh. The walls were not merely hot but alive, pulsing with rhythm that matched no heartbeat I recognized, breathing with lungs that consumed rather than sustained. Rivers of lava flowed past, their surfaces rippling with currents, their depths glowing brighter than their surfaces, suggesting heat beyond heat, temperature that had achieved density and weight.

The air itself shimmered, distorted, turned vision into unreliable narrator that showed me things that might have been real or might have been hallucination born of cooking brain tissue. Breathing was agony. Each inhalation burned my throat, my lungs, everything the air touched on its way into my body. Each exhalation provided no relief, just emptied space for more burning to fill.

The pressure was crushing, oppressive in ways that went beyond physical. This was not merely hell. This was Hell’s attention, its awareness, its consciousness focusing on the intruder who had violated its domain with cold that had no business existing here.

Ice formed around me without conscious thought, without deliberate spell casting. My body created it instinctively, divine power responding to threat, protecting its carrier.

A bubble of cold manifested in the ocean of fire. Not large. Barely enough space to contain my body with arms outstretched. But sufficient to let me breathe without searing my lungs, to see without my eyes boiling in their sockets, to move without my flesh simply sliding off bones that had become too hot to support it.

The shield was fragile. I felt it straining against the environment, felt cracks forming and reforming as fast as my power could repair them, felt the constant drain of maintaining something so fundamentally opposed to everything surrounding it.

But I was alive. Could breathe. Could see. Could move.

Could also feel completely and utterly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what I had just attempted with nothing but power and sheer determination.

The realm fought back immediately. Hell, contrary to what I’d been told, didn’t feel like a passive environment but living thing, conscious entity that felt my presence the way a body feels a sickness.

Fire surged toward me from all directions simultaneously. Not the scattered flames of individual demons but coordinated assault, concentrated heat that sought to overwhelm my shield through simple application of superior force.

The bubble of cold around me compressed, shrinking as fire pressed inward, temperature rising inside my protection as the barrier failed to keep out everything trying to get through.

The shield cracked. Reformed. Cracked again. Each cycle took power I could not spare, drained reserves that were already depleting faster than they should, that were being consumed by the simple act of existing in an environment designed specifically to oppose everything I represented.

Then the demons noticed me.

They poured from tunnels I had not seen, from crevices in glowing walls, from rivers of lava that apparently served as highways for things made of living fire. These were different from the ones I had fought above. Older. Larger. Stronger in ways that went beyond simple physical size.

These were original demons, the ones who had been imprisoned first, who had spent the longest time festering in hell’s depths before corruption completed its work and transformed divine guardians into demonic weapons.

They moved with coordination that suggested retained intelligence, that spoke of strategy rather than mindless rage, that made them infinitely more dangerous than their surface cousins.

I fought blind. The heat played tricks with my senses, made distances uncertain, made movement unpredictable.

Ice magic that had flowed effortlessly above ground struggled here, each spell requiring twice the power to achieve half the effect, every conjuration fighting against environment that wanted to melt it before it finished forming.

Fire was simply too strong here. In its domain. In the realm where heat ruled absolutely and cold was barely tolerated intruder that would be eliminated through patient application of overwhelming force.

Four demons reached me simultaneously. My ice spears caught two, froze them solid despite the heat that tried to prevent it, shattered them into fragments that melted before hitting ground. The other two got through my defenses, their claws raking across my shield, their touch sending cracks spider-webbing through frozen protection.

Then there were ten. Then twenty. They swarmed with purpose that spoke of coordination, of shared consciousness or hive intelligence or simply the understanding that overwhelming single target with numbers was effective strategy regardless of how powerful that target claimed to be.

I could not keep up. For every demon I destroyed, two more took its place, and killing was becoming harder as my power drained, as the constant assault on my shield demanded attention and energy that should have been going toward offense.

Between desperate fights, between moments when demons paused to regroup or reassess or simply catch whatever passed for breath in creatures made of living magma, I tried to think through the panic that was threatening to overwhelm tactics.

Magic always had source. Always. This summoning had not simply happened spontaneously, had not manifested from nowhere because someone wished hard enough.

A portal had been opened between realms that were meant to remain separate, and portals required anchors, required focal points, required some physical manifestation that maintained the connection and kept the way open.

Destroy that anchor and everything collapsed. The portal would close. The demons would be severed from their source. The invasion would end not because I had killed every demon individually but because I had cut off their reinforcement, had sealed the wound in reality that allowed them through.

But where was it? How did I find one object in a realm that was itself a maze, that twisted and turned and refused to follow rules of three-dimensional space, that existed partially in reality and partially in nightmare?

Hell was labyrinth. Tunnels branched in every direction, splitting and merging and creating patterns that made no sense, that suggested architecture designed by something that did not understand or care about mortal navigation.

Every passage glowed with same red-orange light. Every wall pulsed with same rhythm. Every turn looked identical to the last, creating disorientation that went beyond simple getting lost and entered territory where direction itself became meaningless concept.

I was getting turned around. Losing track of where I had been, where I was going, whether I was descending deeper or circling back toward the surface. The demons harried me constantly, never giving me time to orient, never allowing the pause I needed to actually search rather than simply survive.

Constant attacks wore me down. Each fight drained a little more power, cracked my shield a little further, pushed me closer to the moment when my current level of divine protection would fail completely and hell would claim what I had been foolish enough to bring into its depths.

My ice shield was cracking faster than I could repair it now. Fractures spread across the surface like frost patterns on window glass, beautiful in their complexity, terrifying in what they represented.

Power was draining at rates that should not be possible, that suggested hell was not merely opposing me but actively leeching strength, feeding on the divine energy I brought into its realm like parasite drinking from host.

This was impossible. The word kept repeating in my mind, between sword strikes and spell casting and desperate dodging, between moments when I could think at all rather than simply react.

This was impossible, and I had been a fool to attempt it, and I was going to die down here in fire and darkness with my city still burning above and Eris riding away from the danger I could not protect her from because I was trapped in hell playing human when I should have surrendered to what I had become.

The demons sensed my containment,my clenched-teeth control, the dam of my will on the verge of a catastrophic breach. They pressed harder, attacked faster, coordinated their strikes to provoke the same primal reflex until discipline became a scream and the scream became a fissure and my humanity was failing one piece at a time.

I was losing... not the fight, but myself. For the first time since awakening the divine fire within, since touching that infinite, cold star, I was actually, genuinely considering letting it burn because control meant less than survival, because being god-touched meant nothing if I died here clinging to a form that could not withstand hell.

The realization should have been terrifying. Should have sent me scrambling for a purer focus, for stricter discipline, for any option except the one that beckoned: to stop holding back.

Instead, somewhere beneath the panic and exhaustion and pain from maintaining a shape that was actively dissolving, I felt something else entirely.

I felt a spark of the fury I was so desperately trying to contain.