To Hell and Back Again

It felt like home, but it was all so extraordinary and alien to Madeline. She had finally visited the realm of her biological father, the demon lord of Envy, Leviathan.

Everything was so wet and slimy. They were surrounded by damned souls, drowning, suffocating, tortured, wishing for a second death. And they would see Madeline, looking up from the mud and the slime and the pain, and she was dry, and comfortable, and clean, and they all wished that they could be her.

Madeline didn't meet her father directly, but she met an aspect of him, a slimy tentacled demon named Ophek. And Ophek seemed to revel in the suffering around them. In life, he said, some of these people had been such big shots - bankers, white collar criminals, thieves, living it up in the city with their ill-gotten gains. They thought they were so cool, they all thought they were better than someone like Madeline, who came from a small town in bumfuck nowhere, but now look at them!

Ophek taught her some things about her heritage that she hadn't pieced together. Her patron sin, Envy, wasn't just about striving for what she didn't have, but wanting other people not to have it. Those lousy, undeserving fucks. And he had given his daughter a gift: a blessing to help her take people down a peg.

Ophek had so much casual charisma about it all, and the whole experience made her feel so important and special and powerful in such a dangerous way. Madeline got to meet the soul of the politician who sold out her hometown, destroying its economy. She got to eat sushi, and rave about how it was the most delicious and savory she'd ever eaten, while that scumbag starved and rotted in the mud, watching.

She took to it all better than she expected. Ophek was proud.


Madeline and Malka finished their trip with a nice dinner with their family. Siblings and aspects of their father, mostly. Just about everyone was jealous of those two for getting to live at Manta Carlos. The weather down here sucked. It wasn't just the heat that made this hell-weather horrible - it was the oppressive humidity.

Now Madeline was walking with Malka to the outskirts of hell, where they would find a portal back to Manta Carlos. Despite how swampy and slimy and wet this place was, her shoes remained clean and dry. And once Madeline felt like she was sufficiently far away from their other family members, she had a confession to make:

"Malka... This place is messed up. And I feel more messed up for having come here."

@Ephemral

"Well, where do I start?"

She wasn't actually sure where to start. "I mean, I tortured a people over here. And I felt good about it. And it kinda feels like I'm turning into a horrible person? Or I was a horrible person ever since I was born, and I just..."

Madeline slowed down and sat on a rock - trying to place herself on the most tolerable and unslimy part of the stone she could find. "I don't know, Malka. And now I feel like even more of an asshole for bringing it up."