Sinner's Song

"All that glitters is not gold"

Part Six: Sloth

Another day, another massacre down in the department of Wrath. Screams and crashing could be heard from the floor beneath us. Their latest outburst shook the walls causing tremors. Whatever wasn't bolted to the ground went tumbling off the shelves. I'm surprised that the building hasn't collapsed in all these years.

In all honesty, I'm a little jealous of how passionate those guys in Wrath are. Here in my department, it's like a perpetual graveyard. The fog that ghosts through the department is cold and numbing. The silence that never goes away is deafening. Sometimes I dream of a better afterlife. One where it's sunny and warm, where people can raise their voices above a whisper without their throat burning.

But that's not how things work here.

You don't get to walk away once you've made a deal. You either resign to having your soul collected or you become an employee. Even then, the only way employees are let go is once their soul begins to wither under the weight of their sin. Even in the afterlife, nothing lasts forever. For some, it happens quicker but for people like me, it takes a while.

"Daiyu, Boss is looking for you."

I turned towards the voice that emerged from the thick fog to see my co-worker standing with a stack of folders in her hand. "Alright. Thanks for letting me know," I whispered back. Straightening the lanyard around my neck I made sure my name was visible.

Daiyu Acedia, employee of the department of Sloth.

I made my way to the department head's office. The name Belphegor was neatly printed on the sign in front of the door. I knocked and watched as the door creaked open slowly. Inside the room, it was so quiet that the sound of my footsteps made my ears tingle with how loud they were.

"You needed me, sir?"

Belphegor looked up from his desk. The dark circles around his eyes were as prominent as ever. Yawning, he handed me a golden coin. "You're on chariot duty today. You know what to do," His airy voice resounded in the silent room, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Fantastic.

I took the coin and nodded. Exiting his office, I hurried down to the stables. Our department was probably one of the oldest departments here and so we often dealt with...older ways of doing things. From the architecture to the little things we had to do in order to get our jobs done. Belphegor was asleep most of the time, so he missed oh I don't know, hundreds of years of progress. It made him a stickler for tradition. Kind of makes me wish I was in a different department so I wouldn't have to handwrite my reports.

Descending the long spiral staircase in the tower leading to the stables, I pondered what kind of things I would see in the fields today. It was never a pleasant place. The fog that permeated our department was even denser outside. So dense that we needed a guide to make sure we wouldn't get trapped inside. I handed the charioteer the coin as payment and got on his chariot. He wasted no time in riding off.

The clouds of fog wisped around us. If you listened closely you could hear the whispers of all the souls who had been lost within. The further in we got, the colder it became until an unnatural silence hung in the air and distant shadows began to move behind the fog. The charioteer was handpicked by the CEO to serve as our guide. If you weren't careful, the mist would begin to drive you mad as well. You could say that the charioteer was meant to not only serve as our guide but make sure we didn't succumb to the fog.

See Limbo was where all the souls who rebelled went. Occasionally the CEO would throw in people who refused to make contracts with us as well and while cases like that rarely happened, when it did, they would be trapped in here to live out horrendous loops of torture. He doesn't take rejection well.