Death is immortality.
Death is your second chance.
Velian Terrashine belongs to a classless society of equality, art and democracy; a land full of creativity and mindfulness. It is in that perfect political system that one wrong movement, one carele...
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CRIMSON RED WAS the color of the blood that was splashed on my face. Touching my lips, I flinched the moment I came across a deep cut and instantly removed my fingertips from it.
My bones ached while scattered flashes of shadows crowded my blurry vision. I didn't know how many hours, days or weeks had passed since the moment I'd arrived here; I didn't know if the concept of time even existed in this eternal kingdom of evilness. A gentle sense of oblivion had been accompanying me ever since I'd woken up, but now it was slowly and surely fading away. Shrugging off the persistent feeling of nausea, I wearily tried to keep my eyelids open and fight the undefeatable urge to keep sleeping forever. It took me a few heartbeats to understand what I was seeing. My stomach knotted at the eerie reek that wafted in the air.
Still on the ground but now with my back against the wall, I scouted the place, I scouted Hell.
It wasn't red. There weren't flames scorching the souls of the devious, evil and cruel people that had ended up here, nor devils patrolling around, inspecting the place. It was more like a landfill of people with dusty faces, empty eyes and pale skin, trembling from the low temperature and the imminent doom.
No. This place wasn't a burning, flaming cage of sinners facing their unchangeable fates, but a hostile warehouse with the weather of a snowy day. A deformity of Hell, we as humans had been fantasizing about since the day we'd been born. The brick walls of the room I'd been brought to were covered in ancient words and symbols that in some other language might reveal something meaningful. But now almost all of them seemed bewildering, nonsense letters and illustrations that only added a sensation of mystery to the already tense atmosphere.
Standing up, I let my back touch the wall until I found my balance; until the dizziness was over. A slow murmuring was echoing through the place, low and dwindling, entwined with the darkness and the crisp air. In this chamber that had no windows and only one torch to break the blackness, the sound that prevailed was the heavy breaths of the people that lay unconscious on the floor. There must be ten or maybe more of them and they all stank of filthiness and decay.
Denfer hadn't been exaggerating about Hell---it was cold and dreading. Nothing visible to be afraid of, yet everything felt terrifying.
Dropping to my knees again, I tapped the shoulder of an unconscious woman with short black hair and ripped clothes. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn't look at me outraged, deciding to harm me. But her breathing pattern was steady and slower than the normal pace. Maybe she was sleeping, I thought to myself, and started walking toward the direction the crying for help was coming from.
I didn't know where I was heading to, and the torchlight of the murky corridor I'd taken didn't so much as enhance my situation. It was too dark, too silent and too void of people---the last one could be a good thing though, considering that I was in Hell, a place for sinners and history's greatest criminals.
