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ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-CHERON
The blue star comforted her.
She could not explain the emotion, why its cool hue, so different from the surrounding sky of fire, bespoke salvation. She only knew that it did and that she wanted to embrace it.
She was a brick. Roughly three feet long, two feet high, and two feet wide, she was a block, dense, dark, and dry. Only one of her eyes, exposed upon her upper surface, its brilliant blue iris startling against the deep, raw umber of her rugose skin, gave the oblong form any sense of life.
The soul who had been called by her companions Bo-ad had been made into a brick, identical save for the twisting, puckered textures on her sides to the millions upon millions that she had seen and ignored when she had been able to walk the streets of Adamantinarx.
Lying alongside her fellow souls, incorporated into the steps of a great plinth, she dozed in the oppressive heat, her thoughts turning like the slowest of wagon wheels. Her sluggish mind seemed to take hours to complete the simplest thought, to reason through the most obvious conclusions. The best she could do was to try not to think at all, to let the events of the street that stretched before her wash over her and manage as best she could to understand them.
The memory of her transformation was so traumatic that she tried to evade it, to push it away. But as much as she thought to deny it, it reappeared, blocking any recollection from the past that might offer comfort. And so she was forced to obsess about it, revisiting in painfully slow and excruciating detail the moments before she had become a brick. What else was there to do?
She had stood with the other condemned souls, trembling uncontrollably with the nearness of the demons, aware of what was about to befall them. Her future was to be that which all souls feared the most—a future of eternal inactivity. To become one of the uncountable trillions of bricks that gave structure to the chaos of Hell—this was true damnation. It was the demons’ most efficient, most lasting punishment for souls like her who had not been sufficiently broken by their overlords. Somehow, from the moment she had arrived in Hell, she had always known it was to be her fate. Her awareness had been too great, her anger too sharp, and her resentment too obvious.
He had been near enough that, had she been foolish, she could have reached out and touched him. Near enough, too, that she had seen the countless embers burning in his flesh and smelled the acrid brimstone scent of him—a scent so pungent that it took little effort to recall. And every tiny aspect, every minuscule feature of his fierce and bony face, was, even after so much time, vivid enough that it still frightened her. She had never before been so close to a Demon Major and, knowing she was mere moments away from her fate, she had required every bit of her will to remain standing, let alone confront him. She had hated the shaking, the weakness, before a master. In the end she had known, despite her self-perceived independence, she was no different from each of the quivering souls who stood next to her.
It had taken a very long time for her compacted mind and body to adjust to its new state. She had, at first, felt feverish, then suffocated, had wanted to scream, had wanted to cry, and ultimately had wanted to truly die. But all of that was out of her control and eventually she simply lay heavily in place, breathing, screaming, and crying in her mind.
Around her the city had pulsed, growing until the moment that the Lord of Adamantinarx decided it be torn apart. She had known nothing of the reason for this but had heard a great deal of noise, sounds like the demolishing of buildings, and seen clouds of dust rising into the air. Some time after that, things grew still and then the bright cobalt star had appeared in the sky, its sudden appearance a mystery to her. Beneath it, the great statue of Sargatanas reached some five hundred feet into the sky, its arms held wide, its six wings outstretched, its head engulfed in an immense billowing torch of flame. Because of the position of her eye she was forced to stare up at it for the remainder of eternity, a bitter and unending reminder of the demon who had taken her limited freedom from her. Somehow, she did not think her position a coincidence but more the product of vindictiveness for her temerity.
The statue’s voice—the incessant roaring of its fiery head—seemed like a challenge to the thunder of Hell itself. Even so, with that furnace voice and the ambient sounds of Hell fading into the background, she would most often close her eye and will herself to sleep. And so she thought to pass eternity.
* * *
A scuffing sound, sharp enough even with her muffled hearing to seem very near, roused her and she painfully opened her crusted-shut eye. Immediately hot ash and tiny cinders forced her to blink rapidly, their stinging bringing a precious tear to her lower lid. It oozed out and began to pool in her eye, clouding her sight so that all she could see were the molten colors of Hell. For a short time she saw nothing distinctly, straining through the tear shimmer to focus on the limited field of vision that fanned out above her. When the tears had burned away in the heat and she could finally see clearly her world was largely the same as ever—the black statue rising into the cloud-torn sky, embers floating in chaotic, swirling eddies, the tops of buildings that ringed the Forum of Halphas.
A demon’s shape, tall and angular and aglow with burning sigils, could be just seen a yard or so away from her. She strained unsuccessfully to give detail to the vague form, rolling her eye to the side until the compressed muscles behind it seemed as if they would snap. While she was used to the ebb and flow of passing travelers, worker souls and those who stopped to look up at the blazing statue, this was an occurrence the likes of which, after her many months of enervating punishment, she could not remember. No one purposefully came this close—there was no point to attempt to look upon a statue so tall from such a close vantage. A wave of terrible dread spread through her crushed body, a sensation so potent that, for a moment, she almost felt alive. It was a higher demon who approached, she knew not just from her own reaction but from the two adjacent bricks that were to either side of her. Their tiny tremors were unmistakable.
She closed her eye. The pain of trying to see who stood near her was almost unbearable.
Over the roar of the flames she heard the shattered-glass intonation of demonic words exchanged, and knew there to be more than one of them standing in proximity. She could, with difficulty, understand the demons’ tongue but could only distinguish a few of the barely heard words. One word—a name spoken with reverence—was repeated. Sargatanas—the Lord of Adamantinarx, the Demon Major who had ordered her punishment. How she hated him!
She opened her eye a fraction, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible.
Both demons were almost atop her. The nearer of the two carried a carved bone staff while she could now make out a winged demon who stood a few paces off. Both appeared to be looking down, searching the plinth for something. She watched them through her slitted eye and with each foot they drew nearer she could see and hear more. The wingless one was darkly robed and had the head of some horrible beast, all moving teeth and hornlets and ridges, while the other, wearing a leather satchel that hung from a buckled baldric, was deep red from head to wings to clawed feet and seemed more well formed.
“I am sure it was the one just in front of you,” she heard the farther of the demons say. “Lord Valefar showed me.” He paused. “Truly, I should have dealt with this sooner.”
“Really, my lord? They all look alike. I cannot recall—it was quite some time ago and did not seem important at the time. It might have been this one,” said the other demon. “Or this one.” And suddenly she felt a sharp stab as the beast-headed demon’s staff was jabbed into her exposed upper surface. Her eye flashed open with the pain of it.
“It is that one! See, Abbeladdur, it is just as I said. Look at that eye!”
The beast-headed demon leaned forward and peered into her eye.
“Your memory is good, Eligor. Better, it would seem, than mine.”
Copyright © 2019 by Wayne Barlowe
