David set his eyes on Dao, and smiled. God, she was so beautiful, and nice, way nicer than any demon he’d met yet, Las included.
Other satyrs were hot, too, usually six or seven feet tall, walking on a pair of hooves, huge asses with no tails, all eyeless with black bone covering their eye sockets and forehead that merged into their four ram horns. Unlike other satyrs, Dao had hips and boobs for days, but that wasn’t the reason his eyes locked onto her and the many black spikes on her back. He liked watching her. He liked her presence.
So did Acelina.
“You’d react the same way,” he said, “if you knew her as well as I did.”
Acelina snorted, a hot gust of hair hit his neck and shoulder, and she gestured out past him to the satyr ahead.
“Then gather those emotions and channel them. Demons do it all the time. Emotions give our sin strength, and we use them to either drown the world in rage, or lust.”
“I… I mean, I’m not sure I can just summon that emotion. That was a heavy emotion. I thought Dao was dead.”
Shrugging, Acelina backed off, but also flicked him in the back of his head with a claw.
“Hell is a realm of intent, and emotion. Learn to summon and channel them.”
That was a good point. He stared at the small mound of dirt in his hands, and past it to Dao. The memory of a crazy angel’s sword stabbing through her like she was made of butter was clear, visceral, and thinking about it got his blood boiling.
Method acting. Channel the emotion by thinking about something else? David was no actor, struggled to hold eye contact, and always did everything he could to remove his emotions from any argument. Emotions never helped anyone. Except when they did.
David closed his eyes for a second, long enough to recall the weak clicks Dao had made when she’d collapsed, and the searing heat that’d shot through his veins. His whole life, he’d have instantly recognized he was delving into a bad memory, and have pulled himself out of it with a distraction. Porn, video games, candy, something. Dwelling on a bad memory was a great way to destroy yourself, and he knew that from a young age.
It was why that funeral had run him over. So many people, pouring their guts out wordlessly, crying and sobbing. It’d broken him. He couldn’t handle being around emotions like that, not when they were real. Mia could, but not him.
He tried to summon what he’d felt when Dao had gotten hurt. It bubbled, simmered, but died away before it could boil, because of course it did. Because he’d trained himself to suppress emotions like that, control them, bury them. It was a reflex that got in his way when it came to making friends and to talking people, but he’d never considered it all that important, then. Now…
Sighing, he let the dirt go.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Twilight came and went, with only the shade of the fog to tell them it had, the burning sky above having only a mild effect with the fog blocking much of it.
Vicus knew where he was going, and Caera seemed to have at least some knowledge of the area, enough she trusted his direction. Good, because David didn’t have a clue. It was easy to orient which way to go when they were walking on mountainsides, and could see out dozens, even hundreds of kilometers, sometimes all the way to the inner or outer edge of Hell. But in the Grave Valley, the fog and depth of the valley meant he couldn’t see shit.
“At least it isn’t the Black Valley,” Jes whispered over her shoulder.
“Is it bad there?”
“The fog is thicker, and darker. It’s an endless swamp of remnant guts, all tainted black. The worst hellbeasts you can imagine swim underneath the gore. The–”
He put up a hand. “I get it. Mia’s in for a rough time.”
“Rough indeed,” Acelina said. “Zelandariel spoke of the Black Valley often, and the difficulty traversing it when she attacked it in the past. The Black Valley does not have as many demons as Death’s Grip, but the ones that live there are deadly, and crafty. They have to be, the survive the hellbeasts.”
David eyed the spire mother, and she flashed her shark smile at him.
“Not like we’re going to have it easy,” Jes said. “And I don’t mean because of the rider. Hellbeasts are deadly, but they can be avoided. Demons, on the other hand, it’s better to just kill them before they kill you.” She gestured to Vicus ahead of them before giving him an accusing glare. She didn’t trust Vicus, and from the way she was wiggling her claws and flaring her wings, she was ready for a fight.
That idea got under David’s skin. If everyone defaulted to thinking everyone else was out to get them, cooperation was impossible, and it wouldn’t be long before everyone was dead. Why wasn’t every demon dead already if that was how they lived?
“Acelina,” he whispered, “how many demons do you let out of the hatching pit, on a day-to-day basis?”
“My sisters and I released perhaps two hundred each day. Half are imps and grems, for they are forever refusing to die, and earn their reward. The other half are the other breeds. Why?”
“Just doing some math.”
Caera suggested there were at least a hundred thousand demons in Death’s Grip, and from the way she’d said it, she didn’t mean imps and grems, the misfits of the demon community. If the spire released a hundred of the bigger demons each day, and the population hovered at a hundred thousand big demons, then on average, a hundred of the bigger demons died every day. That also meant most demons only survived for about a thousand days after being released, some far less, and–
He tripped again, and this time couldn’t stop himself from planting into the ground. That shouldn’t have happened. He pushed himself back to his feet and checked his foot. And froze.
A hand, jutting out of the black dirt beside one of the colossal tombstones, had grabbed his foot. A mound of dirt moved, revealing the ruined hair and scalp of a head.
It splattered under Acelina’s hoof, and David yanked his foot away as the remnant’s hand squeezed with its dying throes. Remnant blood dripped down his leg.
“What the–”
The garbled, broken, desperate screams of the damned cut through the silence of the fog, and every demon spun in random directions as movement erupted. More hands broke up from the ground, gripping at nearby rocks, the dirt, each other, or the giant tombstones, each set of mangled fingers clutching anything they could. It wasn’t long before more heads pushed out from the dirt, and they glared around at David and the demons as they freed themselves from the ground.
“What’s going on?” Vicus asked, doing his best to yell without yelling.
“Doesn’t matter,” Caera said. “Kill them and keep going.”