OVERCAST CRISIS
He was sitting in front of Leviathium's gate of purple, face-encrusted rock. He was amusing himself by staring down the gravehound guarding the gate -- a small one, (can't be more than 15 feet tall) but feral as can be. If it must be said, it'll be said: he was bored.
Devat was dead. He was deader than dead, he was a ghost's ghost and so he was sitting in front of Leviathium and staring down gravehounds, or sharpening his kwan dao, or thinking about his grandfather back in Korea, or holding careful mock-battles with the other unlucky bastards who were stuck here (noone wanted to die a third time), or sitting around and being fucking bored out of his cajones. Today, it was a mix of the first and the last, a tense battle between boredom and common sense.
Common sense revealed the ace in it's sleeve and sent boredom's glistening entrails flying into Devat's face. And when he got done wiping the junk off (boredom must have had one hell of a diet, his intestines were glowing), Devat saw that the gravehound had been taken away, leaving him with nothing to do. He growled as he supposed that the once-living gravehounds must have done millenia ago, and walked back to the temple.
Litius walked up to him once he had entered the enveloping protection of Gavada; which was the name of the temple in this god-forsaken desert waste. He flung a rock at the 3-torus of protective magic and motioned to the corpulent faces of topaz and ivory on the gate. Litius knew that any attempt to continue discussion would end up with her in the third hell, and so walked away. That wasn't enough for Jaevous though, who had -- HAD -- was COMPELLED -- fate had a goddamn GUN to his fucking HEAD -- he was not in CONTROL -- there was no other CHOICE -- to rub the innards-of-boredom thing into Devat's face until it went through, at which point he would probably drill it into bits of skull and scalp left in certain canyon walls.
"Kinda messy, huh? Why the fuck do you stage battles between abstract notions; you know that they won't actually die, right?"
"Shut it, Jaev."
"What the fuck, man. Don't fucking call me--"
"Shut it, Jaev."
"I'm gonna fucking kill you if you don't--"
"Shut it, Jaev."
"Yessir."
This exchange was perfectly calculated to piss both of them off but leave them both unable to take it out on anything. It was their curse. The Big Guy Upstairs gave them a specific time, down to the nanosecond, at which they would be pissed and not be able to do anything about it. And that time happened to be this moment.
Devat was trapped in this hell -- Avici -- with four goons. The two who had just bothered him were Litius and Jaevous. Litius was an Arab girl who had what would best be described as a swordbreaker's bastard child by a scimitar, as done by the Baroque artists of the 1600s. She met Devat in the same battle she died in, if a swipe of blade against blade constitutes meeting. Jaevous was a black man, and he was armed with impulsiveness and two grand chakrams. Very dangerous indeed. He met Devat through Litius in the first hell, or Hades proper.
The other two were Kicet and Zet. Kicet was Korean, like Devat. He met Devat the same way as Litius did: a blocked swing followed up with a stab to the face. He wielded a pair of ramdao, very fancy ramdao that could cut through armor like air. Zet was an insane Hungarian who claimed to be related to Devat. Everyone considered him unworthy of bothering with, and he never bothered anyone else, so it was a kind of mutual ignorance where the result was that Zet didn't really exist.
And Devat was the best of the group, a military general who had taken a kwan dao through five men in a single swing, followed up by cutting the head of an elephant imported from India directly in two, then followed that up by stabbing the enemy general through the heart. He still wielded that self-same kwan dao, but it had been changed by smiths and such in the first hell. The blade was now made of ruby-of-blood -- very strong material -- and the 10 foot shaft made of iron. Heavy, yes, but so very powerful. And besides, he'd trained with this monstrosity for so long that it's weight hardly mattered anymore.
Devat was so bored that his urge to find something to do was almost suicidal. And he was pissed because he was bored. And he was about as impulsive as Jaevous, so he turned midstep while he was walking through the temple, and walked right back out. He was a man on a mission: he was going to kill someone. On his way out, he grabbed his kwan dao. He gave the gravehounds on the cliff behind the temple the finger and walked up to the gate of Leviathium. He sneered at the monstrous, corpulent mineral faces, and looked to where the gate gravehound was not there oh shit that meant he was staring at the fucking Warden.
And indeed he was, and the Warden was staring at him, and particularly at his kwan dao. And he realized, now, why he'd never done this before. The Warden was taller than most gravehounds, being about twenty feet in height at the top of his shining, hairless pate. And he had a pike. Not just what would have been a pike for normal men, mind you, but a colossal pillar-esque pike exceeding forty feet in length and as thick around as Devat's arm. It looked like the tip was touching the sky, piercing through the brown, dusty clouds of the desert canyon that they were in. And he was staring at Devat's kwan dao, and he had that pike on his shoulder, and Devat knew that this was all just intricate poetic allegory for "You're a fucking impulsive idiot who's going to get yourself killed one of these days." As it turned out, his third death was scheduled for today, and the Warden would be administering the permanent anaesthesia personally.
Or not. The Warden just continued to stare at his weapon as though it were scary. But it was made of iron and ruby-of-blood and only twelve feet in length, and he had a pike which would be sufficient to topple mountains made of jade-of-souls and ghost-brass. Meaning that the Warden was baiting him, meaning that he wasn't scared at all and was actually as bored and pissed and impulsive as Devat himself, and only a bit smarter. Meaning that as soon as Devat tried to see if the goon was awake, he'd get smashed against yonder cliff wall and then ritualistically torn asunder over a span of time well exceeding a fortnight. Meaning that running would be A Good Idea, the sooner the better.
So he does the obvious, the foreseen thing. He takes the clear course of action, and decides to piss the Warden off. "Hello, sir Warden! Ahi bitch you out about the dog again? We usually can hear it from in Gavada, did she cut out your voicebox? You wimp, you pussy, you fucking loser. You can't even stand up to an unarmed woman one-fourth your size, you fucking limp-dicked prissy pansy-faced--"
The pike swirled off his shoulder and hit the ground where Devat would have been standing, if it weren't for the fact that when you're twenty feet tall you telegraph sneezing an hour before it happens. Devat took this opportunity to cleave off the lower sixth of the pike with his own weapon, then charged towards the Warden. Accordingly, the ruined pike was raised, rotated, and the butt-end brought down towards Devat; and expertly deflected to one side with a one handed sweep of the kwan dao which took off another eighth or so of the lance. Now it would get progressively more interesting as the bulky weapon was pared down to a maneuverable size.
The Warden soon found his foot in possession of a long gash that would have killed any man that was even half his size, but it served only to piss this colossus off. The pike was used to vault away from Devat's kwan dao, and was thus missing another eighth when he brought it back. Now it would be about the size of a scaled up quarterstaff, and it was used accordingly. The Warden pulled it back with both hands and swung down hard enough that the nearby gates of Leviathium shuddered, and Devat found the ground underneath him following when he jumped away from the point of impact. The result was a roughly capsule-shaped crater about ten feet in diameter, with Devat just outside of it, and the Warden on the other side.
The Warden realized that the pike-cum-staff was directly level with Devat now, such that a simple thrust would skitter over the crater edge and nearly skewer him. Devat hadn't thought of this yet, so when the dust cloud rose and the fluted and cleanly cut end came for him, he had only one choice available to him. He dove to the side, rolled over on his back and swiped the pike away with the flat of his kwan dao, bending the Warden's weapon at the point of impact with the strength of his strike. Then he used the inertia from that to turn over, stabbing his kwan dao into the ground as he finished and using it to help himself stand. Almost immediately he had to backflip over a sweeping blow from the Warden, then reorient himself once he landed.
Right. There's the sky, and there's the OH SHIT. He very barely deflected a horizontal sweep aimed for his head, twisting around and cutting the weapon as it passed harmlessly just overhead. This was getting to the point where the Warden could conceivably start to match Devat's speed, and it was impossible for Devat to ever match his opponent's size. Accordingly, Devat would have to go on the offensive now. He found the Warden in the middle of a thrust, and dodged that with a pirouette to the left. And then the right, and then he was weaving, dodging, pirouetting, dancing, backflipping and blocking a flurry of increasingly faster thrusts from the bent head of the staff-pike. But suddenly the Warden was wide open and recieved a thrust to the gut for his troubles, followed up with a swing to the back-left side of his right knee, finished with a stab to the breadbasket.
The Warden was bleeding all over the place, his intestines were poking out of the gaping hole in his abdomen, but this only seemed to make him more angry. The staff-thrusts redoubled, occasionally switched up with sweeping blows from either side or great overhead arcs that ended in immense, ragged craters. And Devat was struggling to keep up as he parried and dodged and weaved and rolled around. Finally, his opponent fumbled the staff a little when getting ready for one of those earth-shattering overhead smashes, and he was wide open. Devat charged in, the meteor-impact of the staff a foot behind him when it arrived, and he leapt, body describing a javelin with the kwan dao at the tip; aimed for the wounded torso of the Warden. And it hit dead on, severing the spine as well. When Devat removed his kwan dao, he was careful to jump off of the Warden at an angle, for he was falling and his entrails were exiting their assigned places with astonishing speed.
In the end, the overcast sky was reflected in yards of shining intestines, various minced bits of other organs paying mute testament to Devat's power. He looked to the unguarded gates of Leviathium and was surprised to see them opening, permitting him entrance. The others left Gavada as they saw this, each grabbing their weapons. Beyond that door was the third hell, and they saw lunatics rampaging across a burning landscape of shining porphyry, a mad green sun playing across a black sky, and stars wriggling like worms in the firmament. They saw puffy beetles burrow out of vast corpses not unlike the Warden's own, and they saw some kind of hideous amalgam of wolf, octopus and gravehound loping through distant jade steppes. The dusty clouds of the second hell cleared to permit chartreuse sunrays and black depths to seep to the ground, and they were startled to see that they were now trapped in Leviathium, the third hell, with no escape permitted.
The very walls of the canyon around them turned to jeweled slag, and Gavada became another temple, a tower of obsidian with rings of sapphire and grey slate surrounding the upper levels. The gravehounds which had guarded the cliff behind Gavada melted into thousands of glistening silver maggots which ran riot into the eastern distance. Eerily isolated clouds of blood red played across the sky at maddening speed, and their own shadows screamed in agony until they too dissipated. Their shoes melted into quicksilver, and they knew that they must now walk barefoot. Shards of glass hailed from each of the clouds at random, covering an area of no more than five feet at a time and leaving only blood behind, for the glass became that blood even as it hit the ground.
Behind the new temple, there was a shore with foam-green sands, and beyond that an ocean of magenta-and-orange vomit in which swum every one of the terrifying permutations of crab-octopi that the mind can conjure up: every shell was encrusted with the dessicated eyes of giants and every tentacle ended in a human face cackling madly. A scent of blood and lilac filled the air, and there were sounds of distant laughter, and singing, and tinkling of small bells. There was no wind, and the air seemed heavy with the concept of decay. They all turned from this scene now, and retreated to their new temporary home, the tower-temple Kiyan by the shores that lead to distant Menelai, or the fourth hell.
