Page 3 of Lake of Sin

I wasted no time. My conversation with Asmodeus had invigorated me. With all the hubris only a mortal man can bear, I scrambled naked down the hill and walked over the hot glass-like rock. Flames leapt in the air on either side of me. My skin blistered and healed every second, the soles of my feet grew charcoal black. Still, I walked. The pain never hit its crescendo, not when the promise of pleasure drove me forward.

Everywhere was the sound of the lava’s hiss and of—fighting. Beyond the titan walls of the fort, I heard the clang of armour and swords, and I thought of knights. Trumpets and a discordant singing roared around me.

At the end of that long path, a small plaque sat flush beside the deep-set doors. It glistened in gold and declared:

designed by mulciber

Which meant nothing to me at all.

With my jaw clenched and my human fear held at bay by willpower alone, I pressed against the great door. It loomed above me, taller than a tower, and my pressing barely did anything. Nothing budged. So, petulant like a child, I called out, “I am here for the Marquis!”

What did I expect? Nothing happened. I was one human voice struggling against a cacophony of hellish discord. Nothing could be done, but neither could I wait there. I tried the door again for good measure, and every underworked muscle in my flesh pulsed and ached.

I cast about. The walls were too sheer and too tall for me to climb. The lava spat and pulsed. Would my body burn if I leapt into it? Would the skin slough off? Would the burns ever heal? I wondered if Asmodeus would appreciate such a displayof despair at my own inability to reach the Marquis, or if I would be made so hideous my Lord would abandon me forever.

I had been staring into the lava for so long that I barely registered how close I’d moved to the edge. The nearness let the heat scathe my skin, and I blinked rapidly, inhaling sulphur and heat and the scent of my own sweat.

But the nearness allowed me to better see the edge of the fort. A tiny width of stone jutted from its base and encircled the entire fort. If I could balance and stay close to the wall, it would make a near-insubstantial way forward, a path only a fool would follow.

Of course, I was on it within moments.

I pressed my body flush to the stone, which scraped gently against my skin. Flame and heat licked at my back and sweat pricked at the arch that housed my tailbone. Those discordant trumpets continued blaring; none knew I was skirting around like vermin trying to find a way in.

I shuffled around the warm stone, and not once did I question what I was doing or what I had become. I wasn’t any less filled with lust than I had been. The touch of stone against my body wasn’t sobering; I felt perfectly sane as I moved. It took minutes, nearly a half hour, to get halfway around the bend. The sea of lava stopped abruptly where it met the grey sand, but I was in no mood to test whether said sand was any less dangerous, recalling the sea of grass around Furcus’ library and the poison it held. I remained pressed to the wall and found, eventually, a door.

Which was naturally a surprising thing to find halfway around a hellish fort after passing a sea of lava.

The door itself was very plain. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in the monastery. A simple, dark wood with a wooden doorknob. I reached out and turned it, and nearly fell backwards when I realised it was unlocked.

Thankfully, it swung inwards. It scraped over stone, and its hinges shrieked. I went rigid on instinct, straining to hear if the music or the distant clamour had stopped for me. Nothing. I peered into the fort and found I had been deposited in something like a hellish armoury.

Cautiously, I stepped inside. The door slammed shut behind me without intervention, and I spooked, stumbling back against something thin and metal. It fell, clanging onto the stone, disturbing several other things: a giant scoop of steel that could have been a shield for a giant, a spearhead laid next to it and utterly unattached to a pole, and some unnameable objects I had no reference for that were sharp, triangular prisms inlaid with jewels. The space was dark and cluttered. Metal rods crisscrossed overhead, and as I got my bearings, I understood that they were weapons: weapons triple the size of my body, laid haphazardly in a dusty corner. Indeed, this entire room appeared abandoned.

Light spilled in through a door to the right. Though the first door I’d encountered had been human-sized, this archway loomed large. I shivered at the thought of the body that might fit through that door.

I shivered, though not entirely with fear.

I wasted no time snooping in the armoury and instead made for that door. At the edge of the threshold, I peered around the corner and saw what was happening.

A battle. Some kind of fray.

On flat ground, arena-like and dusty, two giants engaged in battle. The hilts of their weapons were interlocked, and they hissed and growled at each other. There were demons or must have been: one had purple skin rippling with boils, wings and claws sprouting from its flesh. The other had eerily pale skin and the head of a lion. Sweat permeated the air. They roared and shoved back from one another. The lion-head thrust forwardand skewered one of its opponent’s eyes. Black blood oozed from the eye socket, and as it wrenched its arm backwards, the eye popped free. The purple demon howled with rage.

But there were too many banners, too much noise, too much music for it to be atruebattle—and a crowd was watching, I realised. Impish voyeurs gathered in the shadows and chittered or floated above next to demonic cherubim. They were four that I could see, and all of the cherubim were a tetrad of earth creatures. They each had four faces: of a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man, and pressed to the lips of the human face was a trumpet clutched by two human hands. But they had the hoofed feet of a cow and four blackened, stringy wings.

A tournament, then, or a festival.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I crept out from the armoury like they would embrace me with open arms. Me! Nothing more than a naked, desperate human! I ran out with too much confidence, arms open to the Heavens, and I cried out, “I am here to meet the Marquis!”

The music stopped abruptly. The cherubim spun around and cast their four sets of eyes upon me, sixteen ghoulish faces bearing down on me from above. The imps on the ground began to whisper. Growls emerged from the giants. They slumped, their weapons drooping from their arms.

I lowered my arms.

Then, I was roughly yanked from the ground. I kicked the air. Pressure clutched at my waist, and I looked down helplessly to find fingers the size of my forearm wrapped around my midsection. All the air escaped my lungs in a rush.

I had been plucked up by a giant I hadn’t seen, one posted flush to the wall I had just run around.

I tried to twist in its grip, craning to see who had me. It had a strange, pig-like face. Great tusks curled from its cracked lips, and a myriad of eyes exploded over its forehead and half itsskull. Long black tresses fell from the other half. It snorted, and I flinched back from the spray of saliva.

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