In Hell We Trust

Serenity

The goal of a sound mind is a steady flow, emptiness, a dark void within the mind in which there is nothing but absolute silence, no white noise or static. Devoid of emotion and anger it sits below the surface of everyday thoughts and worries like a blank pool in which there are no ripples. It is a place of perfect peace and therefore is the goal of the perfect mind. It cannot be achieved with mere want alone. There are techniques, exercises that will bring one closer to serenity.

Breathing is a large part of this. Breathe in, breathe out. Steady, and with rhythm. The trick is breathing without consciousness of anything else. Honing in on the rhythm of one's life breath will cause even that to slip from the mind until one reaches a place of utter and complete silence. Perfection.

The reason why so many in Hell cannot accept their situation with grace is that they no longer breathe. They no longer have the tools to acquire inner peace. Therefore, most individuals on this earth and in the world beyond, lamentably, will never know of that place. Some, rarely, do.

Moloch relaxed his breath, opened his eyes and allowed himself to think once again. Sensation flooded back into his mind: the jagged edges of the desert rock against the skin of his folded legs, the smell of the acrid wind blowing from the ash-spewing, cloud-covered Fifth Circle below the cliffs, the sound of war drums and constant battle cries from beneath the cloud layer.

Of all the places to meditate, here was probably one of the worst, but Moloch didn't mind in the slightest. He preferred it this way. Mr. Crowley had once kindly offered him a private suite in Sheol Tower back in Limbo, a perfect meditation room with no furniture and no distractions that could, with a flick of a switch, cut out all light and sound until the practitioner was alone with his own thoughts and could set about banishing them for a while.

But Moloch had refused. He came here, on the edge of the war-torn fields of Mania and the scorching desert mountains of Aplistos, because of the challenge of it, to hone his mind with the most extreme crucible he could find. If he could discover serenity on the border of the Circles of greed and wrath, two of the most violent and material locations in the entirety of Hell, then he had greater peace of mind than anyone in this wretched afterlife.

Besides, this place grounded him. Moloch himself was a demon of wrath, born centuries ago in the flames and iron war machines that lurked ever below the clouds of gunsmoke and mustard gas that encapsulated the whole Fifth Circle. Demons and decedent souls alike spent their eternities warring away down there for no reason at all other than to sate their endless fury. Souls were continuously torn apart and reforming, only to take up arms again and march into battle under a different flag, a different army, taking care not to slip on the rivers of blood as they marched out.

Moloch had been no different as a young demon, fighting and fucking and fighting again, over and over until it had been ingrained into his very being, even as a darkness ate away at the back of his brain and nagged him in the middle of the night as he got what few winks he could get between fending off murder attempts from his fellow soldiers. That was the way things worked in Mania. And nothing had changed until, as a young demon of a couple hundred years, Moloch climbed out on a whim to one of the newly constructed bridges being built. Moloch knew nothing of politics or business back then, but had he known he would have understood that the bridges had been constructed by the new administration. to allow access between the Fourth and Sixth Rings without having to go through the Fifth. This was a marvelous idea because traveling through Mania, if not outright fatal, was certainly bad for one's health.

Moloch had had no perception of what life above the cloud layer could be like. But when he broke it, emerged onto the flat of the massive bridge, high enough to see all eight rings of hell, he instinctively fixated on the black tower that rose up from the first Circle, Limbo, all the way in the distance. Something drew him inexplicably to that place, and he knew he had to go.

He traveled for many years. To his great surprise, the people of the other Circles, while not outwardly friendly, certainly did not try to murder him like his compatriots back in Mania. In the muddy plains of Thelo, the Circle of Gluttony, Moloch met a wandering old soul, an ascetic who had struggled with incessant overeating in life and now was forced to suffer eternal hunger.

"You're a lot like me, in a way," the ascetic had told Moloch, prodding him with the tip of his wizened old finger. "You hunger incessantly, but it is violence that you crave and not food. In a way, that is much worse, because at least in life I was able to have my fill of food, if only temporarily. But you will never sate your lust for blood. Not unless you are able to clear your mind."

Moloch was intrigued. Curiosity had never been an emotion he had experienced back on the battlefields of Mania, but he felt it now. He studied with the ascetic for a long while, learned to tame his thoughts and remove all emotion from his mind until he was blank and peaceful at last. It was the ascetic who had taught Moloch the quote that became his mantra, which went something like this:

"If you want peace, stop fighting. If you want peace of mind, stop fighting your thoughts."

Moloch smiled wryly and sat back down on the precipice. The past was a kind of poison, too. He did not like to think about it for too long. It did not matter because who he was then was not who he was now. Thinking such, he closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and focused on taming the rhythm of his breath.