Avenging Cupids

Prologue

"Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;

Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears.

What is it else? A madness most discreet,

A choking gall, and a preserving sweet."

- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"I love you," the naïve girl whispered.

Immediately, a long tear ripped through the stocking-fine boundary between hell and the mortal world. A crash of thunder echoed through the heavens and onyx lightning hacked across the sky like a comet from damnation. The ground beneath the couple's sneakered feet grumbled as if hungry, adding fuel to their trembling bodies. The noontime sun sputtered and died as condensed clouds of smoke and fire began to form. From where they stood in riveting terror, the scene above easily looked like heaven burning by hellfire. They clutched onto one another in a final embrace.

The tear in the sky expanded like a narrow stream widening into a river, and the pair caught a sickening glimpse of the very core of evil. It looked as if Satan tore open his stagnant heart for the world to see. Formless things peered and slithered across the ragged aperture. A roaring fire blazed a sinister red behind the creatures and hellish black smoke wafted out of the hole. The hole exhaled a seething, sulfur-infused wind that caught tendrils of the girl's hair. The broomstick-like bristles of her russet hair whipped across the boy's pallid cheeks, leaving small cuts that stung like acid to a fresh wound.

Amorphous creatures made up of shadow and tar poured through the hole like blackened molasses, their empty eyes zoned in on the girl who had said the Words and the boy who received them. They writhed towards the couple, changing shape with every unnatural step. Some took on the form of twenty-feet-long centipedes embellished in impenetrable beetle-like armor. Others were three-headed hellhounds, their multiple mouths grating and dripping gelatinous slobber. There were horned horses and mermaids, large bipedal isopods, flying pterodactyls, and scaly lobsters-all charred from hellfire, and gashed from the constant blows of whips and chains. Behind them were their evil masters: Damballa and Vritra serpents, Geryon centaurs, Beelzebub, Dagon the Fire Maker, and Irvene demon dogs. And then there were the adversaries of love, the ringleaders of this satanic circus who epitomized horror; they were humanoid and as black as ink with skin-crawling features of boils, three rows of serrated teeth, striped horns, and torn, oil slick wings.

The demons surged forward in perfect unison, finally closing the distance between them and the couple. Whips were cracked, teeth were chattered, and bones were broken. From the center of the dark mass, blood-curdling screams could be heard. The demons drifted backwards with the unnerving grace of a receding wave and stood in silence as they watched their targets howl in pain from the bloody gashes they had left on their frail bodies. They surged forward again, shading the couple with their evil, towering bodies. There was the snapping of bones and the cracking of whips, until all that remained was a pair of hearts that struggled to beat on the blood-stained sand.

#

The eternal boy stood in frozen horror as he teetered at the edge of Paradise, peering down at the evil that had unfolded upon his mortal self and the mortal girl. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing his Sight to sever. As foolish as his determination was, he just had to check. But no matter the design, there could never be a place for him in her life as their doom was still engraved in stone. Even if he rearranged the planets and turned the stars into dust, or so much as placed himself and her in the fiftieth century, the relentless Dark Cherubs would still find them. There was no end to the nightmarish cycle that they were condemned to.