Death After Death

Simon drew his sword before he began to advance, even though there was no immediate threat. He didn’t need to see the man standing amongst the flames grow horns or brandish claws to know he was bad news. He might not have the red skin that Simon would have expected, but there were no way two ways about it. Every movie he’d ever seen had taught him that that dude was a demon, and after the zombie level, he was taking no chances with getting his soul sucked into hell or whatever it was that the demon had planned.

“Easy,” the man said, holding his arms in a gesture of surrender. “I’m on your side here.”

“My side?” Simon asked skeptically as he studied the demon. He was dressed like what he presumed a noble in this era would dress like, with a white tunic, a dark doublet, and a purple short cape along with an elaborately curled hair-do that. “You don’t have any idea who I am.”

“It’s true,” the demon agreed, “but I know your type. Only one kind of hero shows up in this place anymore. The gods made sure of that.”

“And what kind is that?” Simon asked suspiciously. He stopped when he was still ten feet from the man and didn’t plan to get much closer. From here he could see that the boundary that defined the shattered, flaming unreality that the demon occupied from the normal looking cathedral Simon stood in was a thin layer of runes drawn in white chalk.

Even from here they were difficult to read. In places, they looked like they’d been stretched and tortured beyond recognition. While it looked like it had started out as a circle, something had deformed it.

“The kind that are just as trapped out there as I am in here,” the demon said succinctly. Simon had just started to imagine what kind of force could make the underlying space under the boundary runes warp like some kind of black hole phenomena, when the demon’s words completely halted those thoughts in their tracks.

“Excuse me?” Simon sputtered, not completely sure he’d heard him right. The demon couldn’t possibly know that.

“I said that you’re just as trapped in your pit as I am by this blasted circle,” the demon said, smiling. It could see that it had caught Simon’s interest now.

“Come now, you think you’re the first hero Helades has sent this way?” As the demon spoke, it gestured expansively from the door Simon had come in to another door that stood amidst the shattered ruins of the floor, and far too close to the boundary line for comfort. “She’s sent hundreds, no thousands, of heroes this way, but I doubt any of them ever found what they were looking for.”

“Why do you say that? Did you kill them all before they could advance to the next level?” Simon asked, leveling his sword warily as his gaze flicked back and forth between the demon and the path he was pretty sure he needed to take.

“Kill them?” the demon laughed. “My boy, you are free to leave any time you want. You’ll be back. They always come back, you know. Over and over again, until they finally come to me for answers.”

“And why would a demon like you have any answers I need,” Simon asked. His tone had lost much of the combativeness it had held until now because he was genuinely confused. He had no idea what this thing could want from him. “You’re just a monster in this place. A challenge to be defeated and overcome.”

“Take a look at this,” the demon said, ignoring what Simon said, turning around and facing the fiery curtain behind him. With a gesture, he pulled them aside like they were no more than heavy drapes, revealing a fiery hellscape that definitely looked like it was from something straight out of Dante.

For a few seconds, Simon was overcome, and all he could do was stare at the infinite landscape that assaulted his eyes. It wasn’t just a fiery place of suffering, that would have been too simple. It was fractal and endless, and even though he could feel neither its heat nor its torments, he still felt himself tearing up at the sight.

“Notice anything?” The demon asked expectantly, “Any repeating patterns?” Simon shook his head and looked again, even if he didn’t want to.

The volcanic pits of fire and shit were full of writhing souls just like he’d expected, but neither those nor the rivers of blood were probably what this thing wanted him to notice, so he tried looking for something that didn’t belong. In hell, that was a pretty tall hurdle to overcome, so he tried looking for something that wasn’t mindlessly awful.

He found the first example floating not far away above a crooked tower that was far too damaged to stay standing in the real world. It was a set of strangely familiar floating stairs made out of stone fragments. Seconds later he found another example, and another. Only when he saw them all lined up, in a strange fractal pattern that was nearly identical, did he realize that they were all pretty much identical to the stairs that stood in front of him.

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He also noticed that outside of each and every one was a small army of demons just waiting to invade. It was like the hellish version of the beaches of Normandy.

“That’s right,” the demon said. “The goddess you work for is making this scene play out a thousand, thousand times. Those are just the ruptures that are open now, too. Not the ones that haven’t opened yet, or the ones that have been closed.”

“But why would more than one version of the pit be open at once?” Simon asked, not comprehending exactly what was going on here.

“Every one of those rifts is another hero, trying in vain to save the world, just like you are. There are thousands of versions of the pit trying to accomplish that, but no matter how many versions of a world your goddess makes, there will only ever be one version of hell,” the demon answered. “None of them will succeed, of course. How could one ever succeed at an impossible task.”

“It’s not impossible, it’s just…” Simon started to say, stopping himself when he realized he was parroting one of Helades’ lines.

“It’s just really difficult, right?” the demon smiled sardonically, letting the fiery curtain behind him fall back into place. “They all say that too, at first.”

Simon ignored the demon’s words and studied the runic boundary, as well as the chaotic path to the door. “I don’t think you can reach me,” he said finally. It wasn’t going to be the easiest walk to get there, because Simon was no fan of platformers, but the way that the stretched lines of the summoning circle were laid out, the path to the door was clear enough.

“I can’t,” the demon agreed. “But you’ll be back. You’ll be back over and over and over again, and maybe after you get tired of playing her games, you’ll decide you’d rather play one of mine instead.”

Simon ignored him and walked towards a swirling debris field that was somewhere between an asteroid field and a set of stairs. For once, The Pit finally had some brilliant level design and art direction, and Simon found it terrifying. Not that he thought it would be hard to stay on his side of the white line, or that things were moving so quickly that he thought he might lose his balance, but because in the empty spaces between the stones he could see straight down into hell.

“Watch your step,” the demon said, suddenly much closer to Simon than he’d been before, as he suddenly teleported to the closest he could get to and still stay on his side of the line.

The sudden shock terrified Simon, but he was able to suppress the scream, and with a dirty look at the demon that was toying with him, he gingerly stepped down onto the first piece of debris. He was worried that any moment they would all fall out of the sky, but the stones that had once made up the cathedral's floor, and perhaps still did, felt rock solid to Simon.

It took five minutes of very careful steps to reach the door, and the whole way there he was focused as much on all the places he could fall to his death as he was at the slow crawling movements of the lines on the blocks he could see.

When he finally reached the doorway, as he placed his hand on the knob, the demon began clapping somewhere behind him. “Excellent work,” he congratulated him mockingly. “You’ll do even better I’m sure the next time you come back, and the time after that, and… well, you get the idea.”

Simon turned to tell him off, but when he did, there was no one there. He shrugged. The demon disappearing was by far the least weird part of the whole encounter, and he had been right about one thing at least, Simon would eventually pay him another visit whether he wanted to or not.

With that thought in mind, he very slowly turned the knob and eased the door open, wary of some kind of demonic trap. Instead, he found a dusty hallway lined with oil paintings, and lit candelabras that danced with little blue flames.

“Ghosts, huh?” he asked himself, turning around to take one last look around the hellscape that surrounded him. “I’ll take it.”

Simon stepped through the door without looking back and shut it behind him. He didn’t know how he was supposed to kill ghosts, but he’d take a little ectoplasm or whatever over the risk of eternal damnation.

Simon turned to the right this time and began walking. This felt less like a fantasy video game level, and more like something from the survival horror genre, or maybe even the haunted mansion at Disneyland. The jump scares started small, too.

At first, it was just the eyes on the portraits following him, but the further he went, the weirder things got. In the first door he opened was a library where books randomly floated from one shelf to the next. Shortly after that, he found a ballroom, where random articles of clothing danced with one another like the dancers were still wearing them. This was disconcerting enough, but some of them were doing it high above the rest, near the gilded roof of the ballroom.

Simon shut that door immediately and kept going. The weirder things got, the more he felt like he was being watched, though. However, that wasn’t Simon’s biggest problem. The biggest problem he had was that he was completely lost. Even though no one was trying to kill him, the place was huge and seemed to go on forever. Sometimes the rooms had windows, and he could see that he was on the second or third floor of some kind of decaying palace, and that the grounds were just as dilapidated as the building itself.

The calm, quiet demeanor, lulled him into a false sense of security. Nothing had happened, but that didn’t mean that nothing was going to happen, and he was halfway down a hall displaying the rusting weapons and banners that were trophies before he figured that out.

Simon heard one of the banners rustle a bit, and raised his shield towards it, just in time to deflect a morning star that was heading towards him. It bounced off his shield and shattered the window as it went flying outside.

The force of the blow staggered Simon and slammed him against the wall, and a pair of daggers followed, embedding themselves on either side of his head.

Simon forced himself to his feet, warily watching a lance that had floated off the wall, and started to take aim at him. He backed up slowly, looking for somewhere he could escape to that didn’t involve a two-story jump through a broken window.

The lance never reached him. Instead, a sword suddenly thrust through him from behind. He watched in horror as the pain slowly spread through him as the sword blade slowly slid out of his chest covered in blood.

It was a blow to the heart, at least, were Simon’s last conscious thoughts before it all went black.