Wayne Barlowe: God's Demon

When Eligor Fell he found himself upon a smoking plain cratered with the barely moving bodies of a thousand fallen demons. They lay, as he did, stunned, twisted by their furious descents, and glowing from myriad tiny embers. Eligor had been a foot soldier in the celestial Host, attached to the seraph Sargatanas’ legions, and could remember nothing of his final moments Above. Somehow, as he Fell, he had managed to stay near his general’s flaming smoke-plume.

Eligor came upon Sargatanas as he stood upon a wind-whipped bluff, unsteady, the steam of his descent wreathing him. Transformed from luminous seraph to Demon Major, he had lost all of his heavenly trappings and none of his dignity. A corona of embers flitted away from his massive head and Eligor saw it form into a great and complicated sigil for the first time. Sargatanas had been one of the fortunate ones, a demon who had Fallen, uncontested, in an infernal region harsh and inhospitable, albeit rich in minerals and perfect for city-building. Glowing milky white upon a flat plain before them, and bending around a tall central mount, oxbowed a slow-flowing river that would be named Acheron. Here, Eligor somehow knew, a great city would rise.

They stood silently, watching the shower of fiery contrails, the paths of slower descents as they approached their new, unwelcoming home. Eligor glanced over at his lord. He saw Sargatanas looking up, beyond the contrails and beyond the clouds, and saw him close his burning eyes.

A great number of demons gathered about Sargatanas as he set about the founding of his city. The earliest, mostly unknown to him, were those who had descended nearby and, after meeting with him, agreed to join his van. Others traveling from afar, more often than not, had known him from before the Fall and wanted to be by his side, perhaps for comfort, in the new world.

Eligor’s intuition had proven correct; Sargatanas had seen the same potential in the land near where he had Fallen. The boundaries of Sargatanas’ future city were vast, yet the Demon Major had walked them himself, pointing out to Eligor the specific features of the landscape that had provoked his interest in this particular spot. The great river, especially, had won Sargatanas over. As he and Eligor approached its steep banks, they smelled a distinct saltiness carried upon the thick air.

They peered down into the languorously flowing Acheron and both of them could see tiny forms, indistinct and writhing, in the thick water. An unaccountable deep sadness filled them as their lungs filled with the mist-laden air that rose up, and, after a moment, Sargatanas shook his great head and spun away. The gesture surprised Eligor, breaking the odd reverie that had fallen about him.

They left the river and ascended the gradual rise to the projected city’s periphery where, standing assembled in a seemingly endless line twenty ranks deep, were countless souls. They were a miserable, deformed crowd, crying and trembling, as yet unaware of what was going to befall them. Sargatanas drew himself up, smoothing his robes as he walked toward them, deaf to the echoing pleas that filled the air. Eligor, too, ignored them, grown accustomed, as he was, to the souls’ ways.

They were the first arrivals, souls who had been sent as the vanguard of humanities’ effluvia, the damned. A steady stream of them had been arriving since shortly after the demons’ Fall, and while he was repulsed by them and their ways, Eligor found himself fascinated nonetheless.

Their appearance was as grotesque as their croaking chorus; they were as varied and individual as the capricious laws of the demons could create. Somewhere in Hell, somewhere Eligor would never visit, a veritable army of lesser demons had their way with the endless flood of souls as they entered the realm. Legless, headless, corkscrewed, folded, torn, and pierced, each soul wore but the thinnest mask of mankind. No two were alike. And pushed, as if into gray clay by a giant’s hand, into each soul was a black sphere, heavy and dull. Sargatanas told Eligor that the Demons Major had fashioned these globes, filled with the essence of the souls’ transgressions, to serve not only as reminders of their punishment but also as a means for the demons’ control. Beyond that he did not say, but Eligor marveled at the simplicity of it. As he and Sargatanas passed them, Eligor looked into their fog-white eyes and wondered what they knew, whether there was any remnant at all of their previous lives to be found in the gray husks.

Sargatanas approached his new Architect General, greeting him warmly. The Demon Major Halphas, thin and flamboyantly spined, was bedecked in layers of clacking, bone-ornamented robes while above his head blazed his new sigil, an elaborate device that now incorporated the sigil of his liege, Sargatanas, as well. Halphas was smiling as his lord approached. Around him were a half-dozen other demons, his assistants, each of whom looked at their lord with anticipatory pleasure.

“My lord,” Halphas said dramatically, his smile revealing through his destroyed cheeks myriad tiny teeth, “we await but your command and the walls’ foundations will be laid.”

Sargatanas examined the deep trench and took the maps from Halphas, comparing what he could see with the glyph-dense diagrams that appeared on the chart. He nodded and handed them over to Eligor, who studied them briefly.

“You have done a flawless job, Lord Halphas. It is obvious to me how much effort went into your careful plans. And I checked the city limits; they are just as I laid out without the slightest deviation. Excellent!”

“Lord, I am pleased,” Halphas said modestly in his scratchy voice. “The Overseers only await your command.”

“We cannot begin soon enough,” said Sargatanas. He raised his faintly steaming hand and with a small gesture, a flick of his hand, created a simple fiery glyph that immediately fractured and sped off to the many attending demons. They, in their turn, dutifully produced their own glyphs that rose into the sky, and these, flying along the outline of the wall, galvanized the distant demons who began the process of converting souls into bricks. The wailing grew in intensity, but none of the demons paid it any attention. Conscious of their lord’s presence, they were too intent upon beginning the job at hand, as the wall’s foundation started to take form around them.

Eligor watched in amazement; this was the first time he had witnessed any real construction in Hell. The techniques, he knew, were relatively untried. As each glittering glyph touched a selected soul upon its black sphere it would instantly transform from a solid globe into a thick, black liquid that flowed down into the ground. And even as the liquid began to pool, the glyph’s true meaning impacted upon the soul, hammering it, compressing it into a brick, wringing out what little blood there might be, and then sending it tumbling into position in the wall. Silencing its cries forever. And upon each brick, stamped in relief into its wrinkled surface, was the sigil of its lord, Sargatanas.

Black and oily Scourges, demon-tamed Abyssals that flapped their short wings and cracked their cranium-mounted whips, darted about keeping the quavering souls in line. Eligor loathed the Scourges but had to admit their effectiveness. Pressed closely together, the clay-colored souls reacted to the commencement of construction in various ways. Some collapsed, some knelt sobbing, while others, wide-eyed, looked stunned and seemed unable to move. Most stood and pleaded at the top of their voices while a few desperate individuals attempted to run, though Eligor, who was watching all this intently, could not imagine where they thought they would go. Time and again, he would watch the well-trained Scourges fly away in short pursuits, mindlessly flailing the fleeing souls until they collapsed. Once they were still, the souls were hooked and brought back to the trench’s edge. None ever escaped.