Thomas Sniegoski - A Hundred Words for Hate

Taranushi remembered as if it had happened only moments before being presented in his infant state to the Lord God by he who had fashioned him from the stuff of darkness: his master, Malachi.

He could not recall the Lord’s face, but remembered the feel of His eyes. He was to be the first of the Creator’s servants: the soldiers of His glory as He created the universe and all that existed within it.

But the Holy Creator cared not for what Malachi presented, deeming it unfit to exist, and brushing it aside to move on to the next.

The Messengers .

The angels.

But Malachi saw his potential, and refused to erase him from existence.

The Shaitan gazed up into the evening sky, sensing a presence in the pitch-black that surrounded the blazing stars in the sky. Sometime soon that darkness would be hungry enough to consume the stars.

And the Lord God would know the experience of being discarded.

Deemed unfit to exist.

The human woman looked at him with disbelief in her old eyes.

“If only your tiny mind could comprehend the mightiness of the gift that He has bestowed upon you,” Taranushi said with a snarl, resenting the woman for everything that she was.

He shrugged off the rage he felt welling in his being, and flowed across the rooftop to the door that would allow access to the building below. Another muscular limb erupted from his torso, grabbing hold of the doorknob and pulling it with all his might. The knob disintegrated in his grip, and he found himself creating other limbs to tear the barrier from its hinges.

Standing in the now open doorway, the Shaitan sniffed the air, seeking the scent of what had brought him here.

“There it is,” he growled, his bottom half having become like liquid as he flowed down the stairs, his captives under a powerful arm each, to the levels below.

The building was quiet except for the rustling of vermin and the rumble of the structure’s heat source. No one currently resided in the building, but the scent of previous tenants caused his nose to wrinkle in disgust.

Fallen angels—they were the worst-smelling of their kind.

The Shaitan reached the apartment building’s lobby, his muscular neck extending outward, nose twitching as he continued his search.

“It is below,” Taranushi said with a sly grin, moving toward another door. He reached out, sensing that there had been defenses placed there. His fingertips tingled the closer his hand got, powerful angelic magicks infused within the wood to prevent unauthorized entrance.

The creature sneered at the pathetic attempt, throwing himself full force against the barrier and reducing the door to splinters. Angel magick was nothing against the power that had created him.

The disgusting smell of a fallen wafted up from the room below, but there was also another scent beneath it, a smell that made the black sigils upon his pale flesh writhe like maggots.

Taranushi descended to the basement apartment, eyes scanning the darkness for what he had been sent to find.

Though it was weak, and beginning to fade, the stink was unmistakable.

He placed the frail form of Adam down upon a nearby piece of furniture, while uncoiling his tentacle-like limb from around the old woman’s waist.

“Stay where you’ve been put,” he warned her, snarling as he spoke to show off his pointed teeth. He realized that it had been quite some time since he’d fed at the biodome, and found the human before him quite tempting, but he wasn’t about to jeopardize his entire species to satisfy his hunger pangs.

The old woman’s gaze suddenly hardened, and he thought he might need to teach her through pain, but she instead moved herself across the floor to the prone form of Adam lying naked upon the furniture.

“If you’re not meaning to kill him you might want to be a little gentler,” she scolded. She reached into a pocket of the clothes she wore and produced a cloth. Licking the fabric, she proceeded to clean some small wounds upon the first man’s skeletal body.

“Everything is going to be all right,” she cooed to the cadaverous figure. “You just hold on and see.”

Adam remained silent, unmoving, as if dead.

Taranushi was tempted to tell them what their fate would be, but he had already wasted enough time, interacting for centuries with the fragile life-forms that had stolen God’s affections.

Turning toward the lingering aroma, he rushed toward it, eager for his mission to finally be over. After all this time, the pieces had at last fallen into place, and the beginning of the end was about to commence.

At the far end of the basement room the first of the Shaitan stopped before a closed door. He pulled it open to reveal what appeared to be a storage closet. Inside there was an old metal bucket and a mop, and some boxes stained and mildewed from water damage.

Gazing inside, Taranushi felt his smile grow wide with excitement, for he did not see an empty closet; he saw so much more.

He saw through the drifting malodor what had once been there not so very long ago.

Not a closet, but a passage to Hell.

A passage that would soon exist again.

Hell

The entire cave was shaking, the shrieks and moans of a Hell being gradually murdered echoing down the stone passage to where they were.

“It won’t be long now,” Malachi said wistfully, gazing off in that direction. “Changing . . .”

Francis dropped his bare feet down from the stone table to the floor, feeling the violent vibrations increasing in intensity. The entire place—the entire mountain—was just a few minutes away from being shaken to rubble.

The Hellion had risen from where it had patiently lain the entire time he was being tortured—the elder angel rummaging through his brain as if looking for a favorite winter hat. The foul beast paced nervously, glancing toward the sounds of its world being torn asunder.

Francis didn’t know what he was going to do. To say he was weak was an understatement. If asked, Francis would have had a difficult time admitting that he was even alive, but if he wasn’t going to attempt something, who was?

Malachi wasn’t right in the cabeza —a trait that he’d noticed seemed to be quite common in many of the Lord’s more powerful creations of late—and he certainly wasn’t up to anything good. Francis missed being able to pick up the Batphone to give Remy a call. Struggling to stand, he wondered whether Eliza had reached out to the angel, the memory that he had left her one of Remy’s cards, just in case, giving him a warm feeling in his tummy.

Or that just could have been his insides melting to slag.

Maybe Remy would be arriving any minute now, he thought, as the floor of the cave hummed beneath his feet. Flying down the cave corridor, guns blazing—no, Remy would most likely be carrying a sword—sword blazing, coming to save the day.

“You’re smiling,” Malachi said to him, raising his voice to be heard over the commotion outside.

Francis leaned back against the stone table, still too weak to stand on his own two feet.

“Was I?” he commented. “Must be a touch of gas.”

“I thought that perhaps you had resigned yourself to the approaching change . . . a moment of clarity before . . .”

Francis could sense it coming.

“Before what?” he asked, tensing to do something, but what, he did not know.

“Before your usefulness was brought to a close.”

Malachi struck with the speed of a cobra. That fucking scalpel was out again, and whenever that bad boy made an appearance, nothing good followed.

At first Francis thought that nothing had happened, that whatever Malachi was going to do was somehow avoided as the elder stepped back away from him.