Accordant

Prologue

Enormous and daunting, the pit was made of clay and stone, black as though it had burned in the hottest of fires. It had been dug in a perfect circle out of the core of Hell; the surface was the top of the lowest circle of Hell, and the rest was deep underground. The cold air that circulated through the Ninth Circle drifted a few yards down before the heat rising up consumed it and stopped the draft from proceeding any farther and providing any relief.

A long and winding staircase circled the pit. Cut out of the walls of the pit, it offered a short railing on one side and only the pit's wall on the other for support. One could walk the staircase all the way to the floor of the pit, or, if one happened to have wings, one could save oneself the trouble and simply fly to the bottom. That, however, was ill-advised; unless the fallen was of a certain rank, any who attempted to fly into the pit would be shot down by the archers who were stationed at the cardinal and ordinal points on various levels of the staircase.

Many festivities--if one could refer to the horrors suffered in that place as such--had been staged in the bottom of the pit. While the rest of Hell played host to the mortals and a few other species who had committed wrongdoings, this pit had been designed for the most despised and most dishonored of offenders: Those who had transgressed against the fallen themselves. Its present prisoner had been confined within the pit and its adjoining cell for three months. He had not broken yet, but that was no surprise to anyone. Weaker creatures only needed weeks to break down; this one would take a far longer time, and a much more fine-tuned approach. Violence would not be enough to even begin to fracture his spirit.

That would be a welcome challenge. Satan smiled.

Of time they had plenty. Fifteen months comprised only a fourth of Gabriel's sentence. As such, only a fourth of the horrors Satan had planned for him had been issued so far. From the staircase, Satan watched the current happenings. He had noted some time earlier that their prisoner had picked up on Satan's habit of standing at the north point of the pit, and used that as an anchor, a point of control, to keep him oriented or at least give him a constant in his ever-shifting environment. As such, Satan was now standing at the northwest point of the pit. The next time he visited, he would stand to the west.

Blinded by the sweaty brown hair falling into his eyes, Gabriel stood hunched forward across from one of two gates built into the side of the pit. One led to Gabriel's tiny, dark, unbearably hot cell; the other, he guessed, opened onto a hallway. That was where the dispensables came from. Gabriel referred to them as the "dispensables"; he was sure Satan had some more official term for them. They were members of the now-inactive fallen angel army, some skilled in warfare, most not. He thought of their attempts at battle as exercise. The best they could do was wear him out; but that, Gabriel recognized, was happening more and more often as the gaolers released more and more of them every time.

They skulked out once the gate was lifted, dressed in their usual light armor and equipped with standard-issue swords. Gabriel was naked and unarmed save for the chains that bound him at his wrists and ankles. He sighed as the fallen formed a circle around him. Mammon was either not paying attention to how his troops fared in the pit or simply did not care about their lives, as he kept sending them out in the same formations, with the same results every time. At least, he assumed it was Mammon, since the other three archfallen had never been that careless.

Belial stood to the west. He watched the fights only when he knew that Satan planned to amplify the punishment. He had tried his best to keep Satan from going overboard, but the Throne had given Satan a free hand regarding Gabriel's punishment, and Satan had been happy to take full advantage of that. Pride had always fed his vengeance profoundly, Belial recalled.

At the bottom of the pit, the circle of fallen tightened around Gabriel. He remained in the same spot, in the same position, an obvious feint. The fallen raised their swords to strike, and, as the swords fell, Gabriel spun around, ducked under one fallen's sword, and took hold of it while planting both of his feet into the fallen's knees. As they both had a grip on the sword, the move resulted in the fallen flipping over Gabriel, where he caught many of the sword blows on Gabriel's behalf, and Gabriel landed on his own knees, and pushed himself up, extending his black wings just long enough for them to restore him to a standing position, as his bound feet could not handle the effort alone.