Chapter 24

♪ Hell Fire, Dark Fire, Now Tru It’s Your Turn ♪

After I lost the breath of life, everything around me became white. "I guess I only made it a week before my first death." My teeth started chattering uncontrollably as the final words in the description for my [Eternal Love] unique skill berated my mind.

[!WARNING! Consequent to dying, your soul experiences the [Wrath of God].]

[!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!] [!WARNING!]

I stood there momentarily blown away when all at once an awesome realization of what was about to happen swept through me like a paralyzing chill. All of my instincts told me, 'I need to escape!' I turned back to find the direction I came in; I ran like a mad dog to get out, but soon all hope had discarded me. At the same time, my surroundings grabbed my attention, the light gradually turned to pure darkness like looking out the back of a train as it went underground, the light of the entrance shrinking off into the distance until all that I could observe was utter blackness. I could feel my spine quake violently when panic invaded my mind.

As I dropped down, already exhausted, staring questionably into the unearthly blackness all around me, one thought passed slowly through my mind—all I had ever gained in life as a sinner, was already not worth it. The fear alone overshadowed every past experience I ever had, drawing out a sense of panic that had never been experienced even from the dawn of the universe.

At the moment my panic set in, a voice told me, "Every good and perfect gift comes from me. First, to experience a taste of my wrath, every good thing must be stripped from you." That was the moment that every good memory I had, every good experience, every good relationship, every good feeling, every good thing was taken from my mind as though they never existed, to begin with. Love, strength, security, joy, kindness, confidence; it all disappeared as though it was the writing on a chalkboard being wiped away by a wet rag. Fear was all I could feel. At least at first. I was so overwhelmingly terrified of the pain of having my soul suffer God's wrath I hadn't even realized that my growing fear was the beginning of it. My panic caused sweat to roll down my aethereal body.

But it didn't stop there, the fear grew unceasingly. I was overcome by the rattling of my own dry bones and a heart that exploded over and over from being stressed past its limit. Even after my heart exploded, I didn't even get a microsecond of respite. The same heart just kept going through a cycle of being so afraid, that it would burst and go right back to before it popped. I had emptied my bladder and bowels violently until the only thing I could see beside the darkness was myself swimming in my own excrement and excreted organs. Never has a place been more real or I more conscious, even though it feels unnatural to experience this without passing out. I feel like I’m at the bottom of a sewage pit of all that is vile and abhorrent. I choke in the stench of it. Feelings of hopelessness and painful loneliness burn me within while towering flames burn me without. I have no defense, and any microcosm of hope vanishes in less than an instant; I curl into a little ball, grind my teeth, and never stop crying.

My wide-open eyes, so full of fear that they can’t be shut, dry out while threatening to shrivel into dust. I soon became dehydrated, the added fear of 'dying' from thirst compounding on every other fear coursing in my veins. I'd lost all ability to reason except to dwell on all of the sins I was paying for, abominations to holiness, so even though I was already dead, the fear of dying persisted. I begged for water but didn't receive an answer until I was on the brink.

Everything in this place is violent. A lifetime of pain is jammed into every moment—pain beyond all the memories of the pain that every person ever experienced on earth—like thousands of knives tearing me to pieces millions of times over just to be ground to dust by rushing sand, all in one second, all imperceptible to my eyes in the purest form of darkness. I scream, begging for it to end, but while my mind continues to collapse, my emotions shatter to irreparable shards of human glass, and my body, imprisoned in these flames, feels like it burns into ashes, even burning away the ashes: each part of me reassembles to go through it again, and again, and again in an infinite loop.

A plain wooden chalice phased into existence before my eyes after my withered body had been on the verge of blowing away like dust in the wind, but no hope had come. Rather, my desperation intensified, and anger started to grow after I grabbed the cup. My hands began to burn with sizzling sounds as my skin was melted to the cup before I dropped it. The skin remained on the cup for only a moment causing the smell of burnt flesh to assail my nostrils. The fear gradually gave way to a more dominant feeling of anger.

Hatred swallowed my heart and mind while I swiftly sunk, as though I was strapped to the anchor of a ship, through the bile surrounding me. The stench was toxic enough to make me feel faint but not enough to take my consciousness. I could feel parts of what I was drowning in wiggling and coiling around me, crawling all over my skin until I felt a sharp pinch. Something squirmed its way into my arm but when I tried to scream out, more of the wriggling worms invaded my mouth, pouring their way down into my lungs and stomach. I couldn’t breathe from the lack of air, but my consciousness refused to give way. Despite my begging for an end, this stupid body wouldn’t listen to me. ‘Just die already!’ I kept thinking. My hatred for this circumstance, for this place, for darkness, for being forsaken by the light, and even hatred for my own body fueled tension on top of the agony.

My exploding heart and veins caressed my entire body in searing pain like acid was being pumped, continuously burning my insides. In an instant, it all vanished. Weightlessness replaced the repugnant surroundings I’d been experiencing for what felt like an eternity. A sidewalk came into my swiftly descending view. ‘I’m about to be turned into paste,’ I thought, fear the only feeling I can experience despite the much less unpleasant situation. I couldn’t see the glass half full. Rather, my thoughts were more along the lines of, the glass is completely empty and now owes the Mafia sink some water or it’ll rape and mutilate me and my family.

My brain was sent straight through my torso; the numbness you’d expect of losing my brain never happened. No, my collapsed body instantly rebuilt itself in the most agonizing way possible. My bones broke in directions that didn’t make sense, forming a grotesque abomination after countless chances. My body pulled apart in every direction and place imaginable. By the time it reshaped a distorted figure that could walk, heavy chains attached themselves to me. They were welded to my skin and so heavy, my legs broke with every forced step.

Eons went by; I tread billions of miles, but the pain never let up. It never got easier. Close to what felt like the entire lifetime of the universe went by before something came into sight. There was a bridge.

In the center of the bridge, a sign faced to my right which said, “Hail, King of the Jews.” By the time I reached the sign, words written with fire appeared on the post.

→ Heaven

↓ Gehenna

I was barely able to speak through the writhing pain of the crushed bones in my legs and walking on the bare muscles of my feet, “Gehenna? What’s Gehe-!” Before I could finish my sentence, the bridge beneath my feet lost its corporeal properties. I fell into a void; nothingness continued below as I plummeted faster and faster, picking up speed as the gravity intensified. The Infinitesimal weights went faster still, ripping my disfigured aethereal body apart when I saw it.

A faint light shone in the depths of the cavern in which I fell. The exact opposite from when I first died all those ages ago. It was as though a train were fast approaching me, or the exit of a tunnel came into view, it’s hard to say because of the ageless sense of negativity that pervaded my mind for all eternity. Hope sprung like a sapling in one of those fast-forwarded videos of plants in the springtime. Yet, I continued to fall.

As the depths grew nearer, terror took me once again. “That’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s a lake of white-hot fire!” Now only mere tens of miles above the flame of eternal, righteous punishment, I started to feel the heat. As one approaches any fire, there are normally a few phases. Still cool but can feel where the warmth is coming from, comfortable warmth, getting a little too close and starting to sweat, too close with a pricking sensation, burning. Each phase was skipped straight to the burning step, only becoming more and more intense the closer I got.

Lonely screams of suffering echoed off the walls of the chasm I fell into, the view of a cross-like bridge ever above me, never leaving my range of vision. My sorrow never reached anyone in my loneliness. Not even demons existed here. Only my own personal torment stayed with me throughout eternity as I paid the price for those I saved.

Peering down, I can see pure white blazes whisk to and fro as the waves in an ocean might sway in a hurricane. The heat was burning away my body at this point, less than a mile above my approaching crash sight. But just then, I could see a part of me, that had yet to be destroyed, slowly start to burn away. “That is…” My soul, the only undying part of me, was being consumed by fire. I re-experienced the fear from the beginning of my suffering with the knowledge that I am about to be erased from existence. No matter how I squirmed, struggled, and tried to resist my fate, the weight from the sins of the people I died to save immobilized me to continue into the lake of fire irresistibly.

But just before I made the first splash into eternal destruction, I woke up in a comfy bed with an ever-fleeting memory of my past eternity.