Chapter 1
The stairs began with no ceremony.
They emerged bluntly from the rock, broad and black, wet with some dark sheen that consumed the faint red light above.
They were not made of obsidian, though they reminded me of such.
I was stepping where very few, if any, once-mortals had stepped before, and around me were things very old and ancient.
Indeed, no familiarity existed in this new realm, and I was out of place, more so than I was even in Hell.
These stones swallowed sound and refused metaphor; I could not accurately compare them to anything, and even ‘obsidian’ is not enough to describe how dark they were.
But I can tell you this: they did not glow.
They were so dark I found it difficult to stare directly at them.
They were simply there, ascending into the thick dark like broken teeth shattering through rock.
I stood before them in contemplative silence, overly aware of the rapid beat of my heart and the sound of blood in my ears.
This–this, before me–was it. Can you comprehend the finality of the act of this ascension?
Can I accurately explain everything it meant to me, and all it represented?
Every action and inaction in my life had led here, and yet, there was no one to witness me.
Perhaps ceremony was more Heaven’s purview, but still it shocked me that there was no acolyte with a candle, no voice calling me forward, no God, who had certainly abandoned me, and perhaps not even Asmodeus in that moment.
Instead, there was just the kind of silence that comes after ritual; the aftermath and finality of something done, and the waiting quiet.
An expectation of deliverance. I had completed my rituals, and now here was the final act, where I would be claimed.
I had left Dantalion’s realm through the doorway Asmodeus had summoned for me, and it had opened here, onto a swimming dark with only these stairs that climbed up and up until they were swallowed by the umbral depths.
Looking back, I suspect I lingered there for so long out of disappointment.
Part of me longed for ceremony or celebration, and another part that had been raised in the quiet asceticism of the Church, recognised this as a test of sorts.
Would I climb with no one to urge me on, and with no promise of what lay at the end?
Yes, that was it. Another test before I reached my Lord.
My feet were bare, and my mouth was dry.
The stone before me was wide enough for three men to walk abreast, but in my heart of hearts, I knew it was not made for procession.
This was no staircase of coronation, but one meant as an ordeal.
The longer I stared, the more certain I grew that all my hesitation and wariness came down to feeling unsettled.
Me! After everything I had endured, it was a simple staircase that gave me pause!
But somehow, that stone possessed the gravity of judgment, and the indifference of something very old.
I had proved myself, and now here was the final test. Faced with the finality of what I had wanted, would I rise as Asmodeus wished, or would some human fear worm its way into my heart?
You’re already in Hell. You have already done so much to get here. Yet I was still human, was I not? It feels inevitable that as a man born mortal I would still contend with mortal whims and fears. This–all of it–could be a mistake. And what then?
But as with any fear relating to the correctness of my actions, I had learned to spy the seams where the Church’s words had stitched themselves to mine.
Too much of my fear was not my own. I had learned that again and again.
So now, with a steadying breath, I undid the work of that fine seamstress and removed the thread binding me to all the fear around eternal damnation.
I had chosen this, and for this last time, I would choose myself once more.
I stepped onto the first stair.
At once, something left me; a breath, or a memory. It passed from the base of my spine to my shoulders and vanished. The air around me thickened, growing neither hotter nor colder, but simply heavier, as though I had stepped not into a new place, but into the attention of something vast and old.
The stairs did not move. But the world around me did.
I felt the shift behind my eyes first — the quiet distortion that marks the threshold of ritual action.
My balance changed. The weight of my limbs adjusted.
Like this, I knew I had entered some new, deeper realm; I was ascending into the court of Asmodeus itself, where no human had ventured perhaps for a very long time. Perhaps never before.
The second stair brought with it a tension low in my abdomen, a tightening that was neither pain nor pleasure, but held the shape of both.
Unbidden, a memory came: I remembered the first time I had denied myself a kiss.
I saw the face of the boy I had wanted, details struck away by time and the fallibility of my memory.
But I remembered how my hands had clenched at my sides, as if by force of will, I could make my physical desire holy.
By the fifth step, my breathing had altered, growing slow and laboured, less from the effort of the climb, and more from the air itself.
Indeed, it was as if the very air required from me more focus: a deeper intake, a deeper commitment, to allow it into my lungs.
I could feel the stone press into the skin of my soles.
There was no forgiveness in it, nothing yielding, but I preferred it that way.
I put intention into everything, and some part of me laughed that this–this!
–might deter anyone who had come as far as I had.
And so it went on, the staircase curving very gently to the left or the right, in arcs so smooth my temple began to throb at the precision of the place.
Here was a geometry more perfect than any cathedral, more absolute than scripture.
There were no torches or markers, and neither did the stairs themselves give any indication of distance or progress.
As time slipped from me, I lost count, and very soon each step might have been the tenth step or the hundredth.
The light did not change. A dull, red haze hung in the air, unmoving.
But soon, through it, I felt Asmodeus. Not above or ahead, but within me.
As it had been throughout the whole of my time in Hell, Asmodeus was not waiting at the end of the staircase like a prince on a throne.
It was already here, in the stone, in the air, and in the faint pressure at the base of my skull.
I had known its voice in dream. I had felt its gaze through the mouths of others–for Asmodeus was the concentration of all my unclaimed desire throughout my whole life.
But now it was something else. Present. Here! So close to me!
“My soul is consumed with longing for your ordinances at all times.”
— Psalm 119:20
I wondered what Asmodeus thought of the boy I had once been, the one who tried to fast his way into righteousness.
Who kissed the altar instead of the mouths he longed for.
Who wrote confessions just to feel wanted.
I wondered if Asmodeus found that boy pathetic, or if it wanted to kiss him, too.
To defile him again and again. If there was anything left in me of the priest I had once been, I believe that climb was intended to strip it from me.
With every step came an outpouring of emotion and memory and shame.
Things I had long forgotten about or not deigned to linger on flounced through my mind.
This was the scaffolding that had held me upright when I still believed I was wrong for existing.
Shame bled out of me in slow, deliberate trickles.
It was not meant to be cathartic, but necessary.
I could not reach Asmodeus carrying rot.
And so I came to realise that this climb marked a perfect limbo.
Caught between priest and consort, I lingered in this intangible space, and through this climb was meant to perfect myself into the one who would be eternally by Asmodeus’ side.
“Come.”
The voice moved through me like oil, dark and thick and without resistance, sinking into the cracks of my soul.
“Come, little priest.”
The last few steps revealed themselves as I reached them, emerging out of shadow.
The climb could have gone on forever if I hadn’t reckoned with the memories rising in me.
These steps slid out of nothing, slow and deliberate, each one shallower than the last, as if the staircase expected me to falter now, to crawl the final stretch on my knees.
My breath was steady. My body hummed low with heat.
I felt stretched thin across the moment, though not weakened, only pulled taut.
The light changed before anything else. The red glow thinned, became something cleaner, colder.
A grey-gold shimmer pooled against the ceiling of the space ahead.
It flickered, briefly, as if stirred by breath and then the stairs ended, dissolving into smooth, unmarked stone.
There was no direct source of light and no visible ceiling, only the sense of space widening around me–immense, airless, and still—as though I had stepped into the lungs of something that had long ago stopped breathing.
The floor had a brittle, fragile quality to it, and in the air hung a sense of expectation.
If someone told me I now stepped within the flesh of an ancient Hell creature, I would have accepted this reality without question, for everything felt strange and old, and the architecture wasn’t quite real.
I walked forward with slow precision, my speed measured not out of fear but because I tried to imbue meaning into every step forward: I come for you.
I answer your call. The air was heavy with a strange density.
The hall loomed vast and still; the floor was made of dull black stone.
Above me, a vaulted dome opened into clouded dark, where smoke shifted, pulsing with veins of reddish amber.
And then, suddenly, there it was.
Asmodeus.