This is hell.

This is Hell’s throne room.

Empty of Lucifer, yes.

But the throne was not empty.

The throne room did not resemble a place, a time, or anything.

It was and was not a place.

It was... how do you describe it?

An absence that had learned how to hold shape.

Everything was black.

Maybe that should be expected.

It’s not the black of darkness, but the black of polished obsidian, reflective and depthless, as though each surface concealed an ocean of unspoken things.

It did. 

Things trapped looked out. 

Souls sent mad from existing in this tormented, trapped state eternally.

A vibration hummed through the throne. A gentle whine made from a billion screaming souls.

The floor mirrored the ceiling perfectly, and the ceiling mirrored something else entirely, something that did not belong to geometry or reason. 

This place could not exist, but it did.

All sound was swallowed here. 

The screams of the trapped. 

Even the shuffling and crying of the damned, those dim, flickering remnants of human consequence, that seemed to arrive already muffled, as if regret itself had learned to whisper.

They formed a never-ending line before the throne. 

Each of those before the throne had once been that particular human's everything.

It’s soul.

Its essence.

Now they were like nothing.

Around the line were demons in their millions, all slavering and pawing at the damned. 

Demanding to be released on those unfortunate for sustenance. For their pleasure.

I will not describe those demonic hordes.

Your mind would revolt.

The demons and the souls were the equivalent of motes of dust before the duke of hell that sat upon the throne.

The being on the throne looked upon all before them as such.

As nought.

The thing on the throne was Astaroth.

At a distance, the figure might have been mistaken for a statue, some impossibly refined work of art commissioned by a civilisation that no longer existed and perhaps never had. 

But that illusion dissolved the moment one looked too long. 

The body was vast, scaled to the room.

Scaled to the throne.

Scaled to the idea of authority itself, and yet perfectly proportioned, as if size were merely a suggestion the demon had chosen to ignore.

The wrong form.

That is the only way it can be described.

It’s utterly wrong form was neither male nor female, and yet it was entirely both.

It was yet not androgynous.

It was the other sex.

The shoulders carried a sculpted strength, elegant and decisive, tapering into a waist that suggested both grace and restraint. 

The musculature was precise, deliberate, as though designed by an intelligence that understood the appeal of the human form but rejected its limitations. 

This... thing had no limitations.

The chest bore the subtle curvature of femininity, though not exaggerated—merely implied, while the lines of the torso held a quiet, undeniable power, the kind that did not need to announce itself.

It would not ever deem it necessary to announce itself. 

It... was.

The limbs were long, perfectly balanced, capable of violence or tenderness with equal ease, though neither quality was ever fully expressed.

The skin, if it could be called that, had the sheen of dark glass, faintly luminous, as though light itself hesitated before settling upon it. 

Not that something as literal... as real as light was found here. 

Beneath that surface of that... skin, something moved. 

Not blood.

Not quite. 

Something older, slower, and infinitely more patient.

And the face...

The face was the most troubling thing of all.

It was beautiful in a way that resisted interpretation.

Not symmetrical in the conventional sense, but arranged with such quiet precision that any attempt to define it felt like an insult.

The features shifted subtly depending on the angle, the observer, perhaps even the thought behind the gaze. 

At one moment, there was softness—a suggestion of warmth, of something almost human. 

In the next, the same expression hardened into something distant, unknowable, entirely without empathy.

The eyes held everything.

They were vast and dark and held the light of the deepest fathoms of the ocean. Not empty, but deep. 

Within them lay a tiny spark that suggested memory without end. 

Civilisations had risen in them and then been erased.

Endless languages that had been created, spoken, and then forgotten filled them.

The corpses of dead gods... Once worshipped and then dismissed, errors. 

Were scattered in innumerable piles in those seats of emptiness.

To meet that gaze was not to be seen, but to be understood—and then, quite quietly, to be destroyed.

Astaroth did not move.

Movement, in that place, felt unnecessary.

Behind the throne, coiled in a state that might have been rest or anticipation, was the dragon.

It was not a creature one could fully comprehend. 

Its body seemed to exist in segments that did not entirely agree with one another, scales overlapping in patterns that shifted if observed too closely. 

Its head, if it had only one, rested just behind Astaroth’s shoulder, elongated and wrong in proportion, its eyes closed but never inactive.

Occasionally, something like breath escaped it, not air, but a distortion, a ripple that passed through the room and caused the reflections in the obsidian to tremble as though reality itself had momentarily lost confidence.

Even the demons at the throne's feet feared the beasts' notice.

It fed up on them at will.

Reaching down at random and picking at the dainty morsels at its whim.

Before the throne stretched a line of souls.

They stood without form, without weight, each one reduced to the faintest... of what they had once believed themselves to be. 

Some flickered. 

Some dimmed. 

A few attempted to speak, though no sound reached the throne. 

The difference in the Duke of Hell’s scale to those that stood before it meant that communication was impossible.

The patience of the souls was not chosen; it was imposed.

They were waiting to be understood.

Astaroth regarded them with a stillness that might have been mistaken for disinterest.

But it was not disinterest.

It was familiarity.

Every soul in that line had already been accounted for long before it arrived. 

Their choices, their justifications, their quiet compromises, each one had been observed, judged, and placed within a structure so vast that the individuals themselves were almost irrelevant. 

There was... Judgement... No, not judgment here, not in the way humans imagined it.

Their free will had already chosen their outcome.

There was only placement for them.

Astaroth’s fingers, long, precise, almost delicate, rested lightly against the arm of the throne. 

One could imagine those hands capable of extraordinary gentleness.

One could imagine them capable of something else entirely.

Neither possibility was comforting.

A note of a soul reached the front of the line.

It trembled, not with fear, exactly, but with the sudden awareness that there would be no negotiation.

Astaroth lowered their gaze.

For a moment, just a moment, the vast machinery of consequence focused on that something so small, something once human, something that had once believed itself singular.

And in that moment, there was the faintest suggestion of something like boredom.

Not the boredom of disinterest, but the boredom of inevitability.

Astaroth spoke.

The voice did not echo. It did not need to.

It simply arrived.

And with it, the soul was gone, folded neatly into its correct place, as though it had never been anything else.

The line shifted forward.

The dragon behind the throne exhaled again, the distortion passing through the obsidian like a thought that should not have been had.

Astaroth did not move.

But somewhere, beneath the stillness, beneath the perfection, there was the faintest flicker of anticipation.

Something, it seemed, was about to interrupt the pattern.

And that, more than anything, held their interest.

Astaroth

I had already seen it.

Not the moment itself, no, that would be far too crude a way of understanding things, but the shape of it, the pressure it placed upon the fabric of what was already inevitable. 

Time, for most, is a corridor. For me, it is an arrangement. 

A pattern of converging lines. 

And somewhere along one of those lines, something… descended.

An intrusion.

Not here. Not yet.

But soon enough to matter.

There was a vibration beneath the throne—not physical, not quite—but something like the echo of intention made manifest. 

An object moving where it should not move. 

A passage opening where no passage had been agreed upon. 

I did not need to turn. 

I did not need to look. I simply understood.

An elevator.

How very… human.

Lucifer had no imagination.

The elevator. 

A human contrivance.

And yet, not human at all.

I allowed myself the smallest of smiles, though it altered the geometry of my face in ways that would have unsettled any creature still capable of surprise.

There it was—the disruption. 

The anomaly dressed in familiarity.

Someone, somewhere, had decided to move pieces across a board they did not own.

How refreshing.

Before me, the line of souls continued its patient advance. 

They flickered, dimmed, trembled. 

Each one, in its final moments, convinced that it still possessed some measure of importance.

They always did. 

It was, perhaps, their most enduring quality.

I regarded them for a moment longer than necessary.

Not out of cruelty.

Out of habit.

Then, with a movement so slight it barely deserved to be called action, I raised my hand.

A single, delicate gesture.

The effect was immediate.

The legions, my legions, did not hesitate. 

They did not question. 

They unfolded from stillness into motion with a precision that bordered on reverence. 

Forty legions of Hell, each a distortion of purpose, each an embodiment of function without doubt or fatigue.

They descended upon the line, each demon in glee.

What followed was not chaos.

It only resembled it.

The souls screamed, of course.

They always screamed when the illusion of order was removed. 

Their forms tore easily—too easily—unravelling under the hands, claws, and intentions of beings who did not recognise resistance as a meaningful concept.

Shapes collapsed. 

Identities fractured. 

What had once been singular dissolved into something far less coherent.

There was terror.

There was pleading.

There was the sudden, dawning awareness that there had never been any safety here at all.

I watched briefly.

Not with pleasure.

But with a certain… appreciation.

The system required interruption from time to time. 

A reminder that structure was not kindness. 

That inevitability did not imply mercy.

Behind me, the dragon stirred, its vast form shifting as though it, too, sensed the change in the pattern.

The distortion of its breath rippled outward, bending the reflections in the obsidian walls into something almost recognisable.

It joined the... mess.

feeding joyfully on anything that it snatched.

I felt a moment of... joy for my... chosen as they fed... what would you call my dragon? Anger maybe. Hate definitely... My dragon Hate.

And then—

There it was.

The call.

Subtle, but precise. 

Not a command, not quite.

More of an invitation written in the language of binding.

Old. 

Careful. 

Clever enough to be interesting, if not particularly impressive.

Belphastus.

Of course.

The ring.

I exhaled, though I had no need to.

There are moments—rare, but not unheard of—when inevitability aligns with novelty. 

When the expected arrives dressed as something new.

This, I suspected, would be one of those moments.

I stood.

The throne did not resist my absence. 

It never did.

Around me, the legions continued their work. 

The last remnants of the line were already losing cohesion, their final expressions dissolving into something far less definable.

The system would correct itself in time.

It always did.

I allowed myself one final glance—not at the destruction, but at the space it created.

Yes.

This would do nicely.

The smile returned, sharper now. 

Knowing.

And then—

I was gone.