The Unwritten

The Unwritten Part VII - The Darkness

Darkness floated above the soulfall nearest to the crack and wavered. Where to go now? The souls rushing passed beneath it were closely packed, indiscriminate blobs coursing over the falls as they streamed into the next chamber below.

The heat as always was unbearable. The lifeforces were enticing as always, projecting their deliciousness to those parasites hovering above them, all of which deftly avoided one another, avoiding their cannibalistic tendencies. If they could even be called that.

Two that ventured too close to one another tore one another apart, only to be fed upon by others that rushed in quickly to devour the bits and pieces and crumbs of what remained. Darkness hung back, half way now between the falls and the fissure to another world somewhere far above and through that crack; somewhere that was beyond this universe of dreadfulness.

Multi layers of personal Hells ran by at breakneck speeds as Darkness hesitated. It knew that hesitation here could be the end. A feeling suddenly overcame it, a feeling of great power. A heavy hitter was coming along from upstream. Off in the distance along in the current there, was a bulge in an already uneven stream. 

It could easily be mistaken for a serpent coursing through the never ending channels of these caverns in this never ending circle of Hell. A kind of Ouroboros, or Uroboros in the old tongues, but one of monstrous proportions. Dozens of the worst people ever to have lived had bunched up together. Like kinds, congealing together through the intermixing of the stream. Eventually like souls always congregated, coagulated and traveled along together for all eternity.

This current block of suffering among sufferings was made up of some of the vilest souls throughout all of human history. Occasional blips flew by of somewhat notorious and miserable spirits. Osama Bin Laden, Nicolae Ceausescu were here and yet, were barely noticeable entities. Jeffrey Dahmer, once known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, a rapist who dismembered and ate seventeen men and boys, flew by but wasn't even a recognizable blip on the radar of the most horrendous of souls.

Such serial murderers didn’t even rate a second glance down here. 

Those unnoticeables were here and many. Like 16th century Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed of the onetime Kingdom of Hungary, labelled by some as the most prolific female serial killer in history. Josef Mengele, Saddam Hussein, Emperor Hirohito, Idi Amin, all were leaking slight power and drew little notice. Which would surprise many who were still living, but most especially any who suffered beneath them.

There were also... others. Others such as Caligula, Nero, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Leopold II of Belgium, Tomas de Torquemada, Heinrich Himmler, Talat Pasha, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, Maximilien Robespierre, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Vlad Dracula, Ivan the Terrible and the most iconic of these, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and the world’s true professional, Mao Zedong.

They were grouped all together, a very noticeable bulge in the fluidity of the furiously blazing stream. Some of them were part of this group for their intentions and the numbers they killed, some for the horrors they evoked upon humanity.

When the cluster hit top of the nearby soulfall their congelation momentarily slowed the stream, sticking in the passageway until the power of the buildup behind them forced them through and over the falls like a bullet shot. Those in the periphery left a little residue along the few existing roughnesses in the millennially worn smooth surfaces where their energies stuck or splashed openly, rising above the stream, soon to be absorbed by Hell spawned vermin or by those such as Darkness, eventually to generate new and uglier forms of the parasitic and the disgusting.

Pieces of their dark energies were attracted to Darkness as well as other spirit vermin, all who quickly rushed upon them, ingesting them instantly, then vanishing out of fear that they too might be consumed by yet another, even larger Hell spawn.

By then the bastard’s clump of humanity had been swept over the falls, moving into the vast morass of souls deep in the next cavern, only to eventually be swept over yet another soulfall and then off again on their never ending journey. There were others there not of this earth, too. Those who had drifted in from... elsewhere. Their power was flavored by an odd spiciness that was almost too intense to behold. Nothing in Hell was saved from damage in being nibbled on, abused, torn and rendered.

The power flooding into Darkness as it ate what had drifted close to it was overpowering and momentarily, flung it into the next level of Hell. There were not nine levels of Hell altogether, as Dante was only partially right. He had guessed well enough however and had somehow divined what was somewhat, while not in any way knowing information unavailable to the living, and so had quite reasonably failed to see what was truly there.

Two of those levels were merely alternate forms of the same things. There were actually only seven levels to Hell and one of those was highly specific to each and every individual’s life experience and personality. It was truly that level that all others hinged upon.

Each of these spirits suffering their own private and conjoined Hells were experiencing a multiplicity of damnations, simultaneously. The flood tide of souls through the caverns were only the most base level, a mere holding area of souls while they were simultaneously tortured seven different ways from their own holy days. That is, if they had ever even believed in one. It mattered little however, if their belief existed or not.

For either way one of those Hells was personnel. Very, very personal, to each and every one of them.