What made it even more terrifying was that Bex had no idea what she was being draggedby. It was so dark that even her normally excellent night vision was useless. All she knew was that the things swirling around her were as strong as deep ocean currents, and they were sucking her into a freezing abyss that was much more terrifying than the void she’d fallen into before. That had been just empty nothing, and she’d had Nemini to help her through it.
There was no one to help her now. Bex couldn’t even open her mouth to scream as the pressure binding her body began to change, sharpening into distinct shapes that felt like arms, hands, legs, even faces. Terrified, screaming faces that bit into Bex’s flesh like zombies.Ghostlyzombies, because whileshe could feel every ridge and point of their sharp teeth, the bites never actually broke her skin. It was just pain and the endless feeling of being devoured. And weirdly enough, that was the feeling that kicked Bex out of her panic, because unlike everything else that had happened since she’d jumped into the Lowest Hells, being held down and chomped on was a feeling she’d experienced many times before.
All at once, Bex stopped fighting and let her body go limp. This caused the things squeezing her to pause as well, loosening the pressure over her mouth long enough for Bex to get out a word.
“Stop,” she ordered in the same commanding tone she used on kick demons.
The writhing bodies wrapped around her didn’t listen, but that was normal too. Even back when she’d had her horns and the voice of a queen, the kick demons trapped in Limbo had always been too crazed with hunger to obey. Now that she was no longer struggling to escape them, Bex could feel that the phantom bodies here were the same. If she focused, she could even feel their horns. Tall, forked, antler-like horns attached to screaming, terrified demons lost in the dark.
The moment she realized that, Bex stopped being afraid. It didn’t matter that she was still being dragged down into a freezing, pitch-black pit. The hands pulling her hair and the invisible teeth biting her flesh weren’t evil ghosts or sorcerous phantoms made to torment Gilgamesh’s enemies. They were demons.
It was so obvious, Bex felt like an idiot for not realizing the truth sooner. The Lowest Hells were uniquely horrible, but that didn’t mean they didn’t serve the same purpose as all the others. They were still a prison built by Gilgamesh to contain Ishtar’s children. Bex even knewwhichchildren because all the other demon tribes were already accounted for. War was in the UpperHells, and Envy, Lust, Greed, Fear, Hate, and Sorrow were all lumped together in the middle. Bex would never not know her own Wrath demons, so that only left one option. These were the demons who’d been cast into the void when Gilgamesh broke their queen, the tragically lost demons of Pride.
Now that she knew what she was dealing with, Bex even recognized the freezing cold darkness she was falling through. It was the same feeling she used to get when Nemini touched her before Bex had lost her name and become a void herself. But where Nemini’s emptiness had always been a calm, empty place where nothing mattered and every burden could be set down, this was a screaming nightmare.
There was no peace in this void, no solace in the emptiness, because it wasn’t empty at all. The darkness here was filled with terror and loss, confusion and hunger, because unlike Nemini, these demons had never hit bottom. They’d been falling and falling andfallingfor five thousand years. No wonder they latched on to anything they came into contact with. They were terrified, which perversely made Bex feel a lot more confident, because if there was anything she’d learned during the month she’d spent rescuing her people from Limbo, it was how to handle a panicking demon.
“Demons of Pride!” she yelled, bellowing into the dark like she could fill the emptiness with nothing but her voice. “I am Rebexa, Queen of Wrath! Like your own queen, I was broken by Gilgamesh, but Ishtar’s creations are resilient! I know you’ve been falling for a long time, but as a wise member of your own tribe just reminded me, nothing lasts forever. Gilgamesh has trapped you in a prison of your own fear just like he trapped my demons in starvation, but we are the people of the Riverlands! If we were truly defeated, the Traitor King wouldn’t need the Hells. He wouldn’t need chains or slave bands, but Gilgamesh relies on all those crutches becausehe has not won. The war isn’t over,so lift your horns, soldiers of Pride! Release me so that I may do Ishtar’s work, and I swear on my mother’s name,I will set you free!”
She’d shouted it with all her might, but Bex’s promise still faded into the void. There was nothing else it could’ve done, because hers was no longer a queen’s voice. She had no name, no horns, no sword, no authority, nothing at all. Despite all she’d lost, though, Bex was still a daughter of Ishtar. For one hundred and ninety-eight lifetimes, she’d refused to accept defeat. Every death, every loss, every time Ishtar had welcomed her home, Bex had picked up her sword and marched back out into the fight. Even when Nemini had offered her the peace of the void, she’d clung stubbornly to her duty because she wasn’t finished. So long as her people were slaves, Bex wouldneverbe finished. She might not be the Bonfire Queen of Wrath anymore, but her anger would never,evergo out. That fire would spark back to life again and again just like Bex herself did, and when she thrust out her hand to the screaming pride demons now, Bex was the one who flared in the dark.
It was just a faint glow at the end of her fingers, nothing like the blazing inferno she normally was, but even tiny lights shine bright when the darkness is deep enough. Bex’s words had been instantly lost, but her fire gleamed through the void like a lighthouse, and everywhere its glow touched, the shattered demons’ screams turned back into words.
Queen!they whispered desperately.Save us!Save us!
“I will,” Bex promised, reaching her glowing fingers as far as they would go. “So long as I draw breath, I swear I’ll get you out.”
She had nothing to back those words up with, but that didn’t seem to matter. The fact that a queen had come to speak to them at all must have been enough, because the reckless words were barely out of Bex’s mouth when the frantic mass ofwrithing demons suddenly let her go. The teeth stopped biting, the hands stopped grabbing, and the thick sea of darkness rolled away to reveal an enormous chamber.
Just like the Middle Hells above, it was shaped like a natural cavern. Since it had been made to hold only one sort of demon, this Hell was smaller, with a much lower ceiling, but the space was still massive. It was also, Bex realized with a start, absolutely packed with demons.
They’d been laid out in rows on the floor like corpses awaiting cremation. Their skin was the same dark brown as Nemini’s, but unlike Bex’s void demon, all of these bodies had horns. Big, beautiful, stag-like antlers that gleamed like obsidian in the faint glow of Bex’s tiny fire. It didn’t look like any of them had slave bands or collars, but Bex wasn’t sure if that was because Gilgamesh didn’t consider them an escape risk or if demons whose names had been shattered couldn’t be collared.
Chains or no chains, though, they weren’t going anywhere. Bex had actually landed on top of one when the grasping hands let her go, but the man didn’t even seem to notice her boot on his chest. His eyes were squeezed shut like he was sleeping, but his whole body was twitching, and his mouth was open in a silent scream. He didn’t react to Bex at all, not even when she shook him with her glowing hand.
That was supremely disappointing. For a moment there, Bex really thought she’d gotten some of her power back. Sadly, it looked like a little glowing was all it was. Her lit-up fingers didn’t feel any warmer than usual, and she couldn’t even sense the void where the demons’ names should have been.
She’d just have to come back down here after she’d retrieved her horns, Bex decided. If Nemini could survive without a queen, surely these demons could too. She’d go out and pick them all up off the riverbank if that was what it took,but she was going to keep her promise, to them and to Nemini. First, though, she had to get what she’d come for.
With that, Bex stopped staring at the demons she couldn’t save yet and started looking around for the ones she could. From what Desh had said earlier, she’d expected them to be all over, but other than the void demons laid out on the floor, she didn’t see anyone, mostly because she couldn’t see much at all. Even with the new glow from her fingers, Bex could only see a few feet in any direction. She was taking tiny steps to start exploring the area her rope could reach when she felt something cold touch her foot.
She jumped away on instinct then sighed. It was just water. Like the Middle Hells above, the floor of the Lowest Hells was also covered in a shallow flood. It was so filthy that it barely reflected her light, which was why Bex hadn’t noticed it until the freezing cold seeped into her boots. Now that she was splashing through it, though, Bex could see that the whole Hell was covered in an ankle-deep, barely moving river.
Using her glowing hand like a flashlight, Bex bent down until her nose was almost touching the water’s oily surface. It was much dirtier than the flood upstairs, but the water here was definitely from a River of Death. This close, Bex could see the black residue of extracted sin building up around the pride demons’ unconscious bodies. It drifted like silt in the shallow river’s gentle current, flowing away from the demons and eventually falling down the grates that were placed everywhere in the Lowest Hells’ stone floor. The amounts were much smaller than the grime she’d seen the other slaves scraping into their buckets upstairs, but the basic idea was the same. The pride demons had been submerged so that their bodies could keep collecting sin even while their minds were lost, and the longer Bex thought about that, the angrier she became.
“Thatbastard,” she snarled, clutching her glowing fist. “He keeps using us even when we sleep.” She kicked her boots through the shallow water, dislodging the thin layer of black sin that had already built up along the sole. “I swear to Ishtar, I’m going to tear down every last one of his damn—”
“Bex!”
Her head shot up. As she’d noted earlier, the ceiling in this Hell wasn’t very high, but the shout still sounded like it’d come from miles away. The disconnect was so jarring, Bex didn’t even realize she’d fallen straight down until she spotted a glimmer directly above her head. When she craned her neck all the way back, she saw Lys staring down at her with the metal flashlight from Bex’s backpack gripped in their hand.
“Bex!” they shouted in a voice gone hoarse from panic. “Are you alive?”
“I’m here,” Bex called back, though she didn’t think they heard. She’d been looking straight at Lys’s face when she yelled, but their amber eyes were still darting all over like they couldn’t sense a thing.
The hole must still look like an impenetrable pit of darkness to them, Bex realized. The void demons had let her go because she’d proven who she was, but that mercy didn’t extend to anyone else, not even themselves. She was able to stand down here without being dragged into terrified madness, but every pride demon was still twitching in the shallow water like victims of the world’s worst nightmare.
It was a heartbreaking sight, but there was nothing Bex could do about it. There was nothing she could do for anyone until she got her horns back, so she got her act together and reached up to tap the button on her ear comm. It took three more taps, though, before Bex realized her radio wasn’t working.
