It had no mountains. A long, long valley, hundreds of kilometers long, with gentle hills along both edges of the Hell donut. At least the valley didn’t seem to sink deep, so it wouldn’t take any effort at all to walk down into it. And hey, no mountains! No more scaling deadly cliffs. No more climbing rocks, rocks, and more rocks. The valley looked, for the most part, flat.
Flat, and dotted with lots of tiny white things poking up from the fog, or at least at a distance they looked like tiny white things. The closer ones had just enough shape to look like something familiar.
“Tombstones,” he said.
“Tombstones,” Caera said, sitting beside him. The other demons did the same, everyone taking the hill’s top as a moment to rest.
“Are there… people in them? In the graves, I mean.”
“They’re not really graves,” she said. “You think anyone in Hell buries their dead?”
“I suppose not. But, then, why tombstones?”
Caera gestured back to the dozens of giant mountains behind them.
“The same reason you found lots of statues. Hell grew them.”
Daoka clicked a few times, came in behind David, and hugged him to her chest so her eyeless gaze went over him. With another weak click, she set her chin on his skull and shook her head.
Jes laughed. “What do you mean, creepy?”
“I am getting Halloween vibes,” David said. “I see a lot of shadow, lot of fog, and a lot of tombstones, and uh… some buildings in the distance. White?”
“Stone,” Caera said. “You’ll see.”
“Right. Uh, anything we should know before we just… start walking down there?”
She shrugged and began a slow walk down the gentle slope. David glanced back at the rest of them, but they all shrugged, too, and followed her. The lack of planning was going to give him an aneurysm, but that was what demons did, even ones like Caera. He scampered after them.
“Seriously, what’re we gonna run into?” He raised a hand and counted fingers. “You told me there’s four areas. The Border Stones right in front of us, then there’s the Black Mausoleum and the Dead Lands, and past them there’s the Amisius Forest. Assuming those names are descriptive, Dao is right, and this is going to be creepy.” After a long sigh, he threw up his hands. “And who thought up these names!? Who’s Amisius?”
“Demons aren’t imaginative,” Caera said. “Far as I know, we either name things the most obvious thing, or name them after some big demon or battle or whatnot, millions of years ago.” She flicked her tail back the way they came. “Geeraz Tombs, Gorzen Mountains, Gazra Crag? I found one record that mentioned Geeraz, Gorzen, and Gazra, a trio of angels who died fighting demons. It could be wrong, of course.”
He was betting on wrong. Much as the girls were all awesome, and Caera had an eye for history, she was definitely an exception. Demons didn’t give a shit about the past, didn’t care to record it, didn’t care to know it, and after a million years, it made perfect sense for names to evolve.
The runes in his head didn’t say anything about the names of places inside the provinces of Hell, and most of the provinces still had their real name. The Grave Valley was really the Grave Valley, which meant whoever created the rune knew what graves were.
He stopped and stared at the ground as the gears in his brain went into overdrive. If God was the one who made the runes that named a bunch of things, did God know about the concept of graves millions of years before they’d exist? It fit the whole omnipotent, omniscient thing, but that made no sense, either. Nothing was omnipotent, or omniscient. They were paradoxical and flawed ideas. Maybe the rune word for grave also meant any place where dead things were? Maybe the runes evolved as the surface evolved? Maybe–
Daoka looked back, clicked up at him, and held out her hand. Analysis paralysis was a bitch. He took her hand, and everyone walked into a completely new section of Hell.
The environment didn’t transition smoothly like it would on the surface. Over a course of maybe a quarter kilometer, the ground went from brown, with specs of red and black, to just black. The dirt grew softer, and compared to the hundreds of kilometers he’d walked barefoot on rock and pebbles, the softer dirt felt like grass. The air grew darker, too, with a thick fog that blocked out some of the light, just enough for evening darkness to settle on them.
There were metal gates.
“What the fuck?” With a shaking hand, he touched the first metal gate, and yanked his hand back. Not actually metal, but blackstone, except it was in the perfect shape of a short fence that only reached his waist and went kilometers in both directions toward the inner and outer edges of Hell. It had spiked tips, too.
“What?” Jes asked, and she hopped over it like it was no big deal.
“This is… a metal fence.” He pushed the gate open. It squeaked, slid open, and he stepped through. “This is the exact sort of fence and gate you’d find outside a graveyard on the surface.”
“You’ve seen a lot of the stuff Hell has grown,” Caera said, and she followed him in. “This surprises you?”
“Yes! The other stuff looked crazy and surreal. The skull braziers, giant black spikes, the statues, all that shit looked… not normal, and perfect for Hell. This looks normal.”
“You would prefer it look unnatural?” Acelina asked. Tall as she was, she stepped over the fence like it wasn’t even there.
“Kinda, yeah. At least when shit looks weird, it fits. When shit looks normal, and then you start seeing the creepy shit that–” There was creepy shit.
A giant tombstone sat before them, white stone stained with black dirt and worn with time. It was twelve feet tall, nearly as wide, and thick enough if it fell on him it’d have squashed him like a tomato. It had no adornments, no letters, but the shape was a classic tombstone, complete with the curved top.
“This!” He gestured to it. “This is what I’m talking about!”
“You saw the tombstones,” Caera said, “back on the hill.”
“I thought they’d be normal size!” His brain had tagged them at a certain height, and it hadn’t even dawned on him to reevaluate until he’d gotten close enough. Mental whiplash.