The Unwritten

The Unwritten Part XI - Darkness

Thrown there because of such a strong feeding, Darkness suddenly found itself in the first Level of Hell. There was fog, everywhere. A cool acidic fog, painful, bursting in places, into flames. That caused a vacuum where the fog would rush then in, even out, twirl, and eventually settle back down. For Darkness as for any other entity in this level, it was like sand paper heated to a white heat and dragged through a body.

If Darkness could scream, it would have.

The odd thing about this level was that it was a satiating as well as an excruciating experience. The energy Darkness had swallowed in the cavern’s Soulfall, had rushed it into this level of Hell and it had expected that. As the sustenance was assimilated from feeding, the fog began to fade. It was returning back to the holding cavern and its never ending stream of souls.

This was the main body of Hell itself. Not really a level itself, it was merely the open door to what was to be avoided at all costs, but couldn't be. Suddenly, Darkness found itself hovering back above the stream of souls as they flowed beneath it.

Agitated, terrified, in pain, it was settling down again into a semblance of stability. The pain was merely unreasonable now and not quite horrific. It was the best way to handle feeding. Eat voraciously, gorge on as much energy as possible as quickly as possible and get feeding over with all at once, then delay the next feeding as long as possible.

Regaining its sensibility it focused again on the fissure above the cavern. In its own way it was wishing the doorway to the outer world would open once again, allow it out, pull it back through to that other domain wherever that was, up there, out there….

It noticed something coming down the pipe toward it. Another new blob of yet another recent soul acquisition. As the newly damned got closer, Darkness approached it too closely from above and like a magnet, was drawn own closer until it touched the event horizon of the soul.

For a mere instant an exchange of "minds" occurred. A momentary deluge of being and non-being. For a wisp of a moment Darkness experienced the soul, but the soul only experienced what Darkness was comprised of, bits and pieces of some of the most horrible beings in all of history.

For the soul it was similar to plugging into a 220 volt outlet when you are merely a 110 volt, but more accurately as like receiving the power of an entire nuclear power plant in a one second burst where you couldn't be blown out. You simply had to experience it and continue…for all of eternity. That soul would never forget what it had just experienced.

Darkness experienced flashes of such horrific events as this soul had seen and done. This was a soul from a recent war torn area. A serial killer, a sadist above and beyond most serial killers. A sadist in a region where sadism had become normalized. Where perpetrating violence and torture was accepted, praised, even rewarded.

Darkness withdrew from the soul and rebounded to the upper part of the cavern, far from the soul, watching as it poured over the Soulfall and down into the next cavern.

Darkness turned and “looked” up at the crack in the ceiling of the cavern. If it could it would have been wishing for escape into a better existence. It revisited the imagery it had just shared with the soul now gone and considered what it might be like for itself to live as a real live creature, “up there”.

To do what those creatures did to one another.