Hell Always Gets Hotter
This was from a flash fiction with the following straightforward prompt:
Tell me a proletarian Halloween story.
I took the flash challenge, which has the prompt-giver give both a spooky monster type and an example of a proletarian uprising from history to draw inpsiration from. I got the following:
Your beastie type is Ice Demon. Your story must feature this creature
Your real world event is the Kautokeino Rebellion. Your story may take inspiration from this event however you see fit.
I may have featured both of these less than intended, but enjoy discovery writing as I refine my process for larger works, and suspect I’m a discovery writer rather than an outliner, at least for dominant traits. I also tried to play with character voice on this one.
Hell Always Gets Hotter
“It-t ain’t fair, it-t just ain’t,” said Frazz, a flame imp and old companion of Ashakar. They stood on the caldera of an active volcano, one of thousands in the region. The obsidian-pocked stone beneath their hooves and scales still hissed and flexed from being flattened by Frazz’s stoneshaping. It gave them a platform for ease of surveying their vast domain.
“What do you mean?” They paced around the platform slowly. Well, Frazz paced, Ashakar slithered.
“Getting hotter?” he rasped. “Ova hea? In Hell? Pfhaw!” He gestured spastically to address these questions to horizons of their domain, “Are you tzerious!?”
Ashakar hesitated and stopped to coil himself in thought. The mandate came all the way from the very bottom. Frazz stopped walking and looked at him expectantly. “This… This is hell.”
“My. Point. Exts-actly!”
Frazz glowed smugly in the silence that followed, like one does after a productive and well-concluded conversation.
“…so what’s wrong with it, then?”
Frazz gave him a look, then puzzled. “How to extsplain, how to extsplain… achk, ok: I’m uh fire demon.” He pointed and paused to make sure he didn’t lose anyone. His finger turned. “You’re uh fire demon.”
“Yeah?”
“And where ‘ah we, roughly tzpeaking, right now?”
“Right now? The 6th circle of hell.”
Once again, Frazz gave a gesture suggesting it’s all so obvious. “Ehh? The pitzz of fire?” He pointed without looking down towards the magma nearby them.
“Yeah.” Ashakar gave up. “It makes sense to me.“
A shocking noise came out of the platform like the crack of some impossibly massive whip—maybe a standard size 3 or 4 torment chain. A column of steam erupted from an area of the still-hot stone. The steam continued for some time. The two waited patiently through the moments it took for the temperature of the rock to cool. It was bloody entrails, materializing from another hell dimension, but the heat was atomizing all of it into an angry mist. A pool of the mess quickly formed as more poured in from non-existence.
*TREMBLE MORTALS* A six-foot wide minotaur skull rose from the pool of boiling viscera. It was Tazremmenon, Immortal Tyrant of the Pits of Unenviable Screaming, Sixth Anointed among the Revered Blood Lords, and Champion of the Great Wars.
“Hey bud,” said Ashakar.
“Tzup bloody t-t-Tee,” said Frazz.
*GREETINGS, ESTEEMED BRETHREN* said Tazremmenon, Immortal Tyrant of the Pits of Unenviable Screaming, Sixth Anointed—
“Taz,” said Ashakar politely, craning his neck to look the blood demon in the eyes after his imposing form had fully emerged. “Can you help me work out what the here our friend is talking about?”
It took no time to catch him up, and he was immediately and frustratingly on Frazz’s side. The hissing stone around them finally subsided.
*IT IS AN ABOMINATION TO ABOMINATIONS. THE ICE DEMONS ONLY DEMAND WHAT IS BEST FOR THE ICE DEMONS* The unspoken voice of Tazremmenon reverberated through all skulls within a thousand miles. They got him to play poker with them once, but only once.
“Yesk, Thatz uh good way to put it-t.”
“Oh it’s this with the ice demons again?”
“Who else? They’ve been p-p-putting us down for millennia, lording under us just because they’ve got the best-t real estate.”
“Excuse me, we’ve got the major circles,” said Ashakar with pride, “The place where hell earns its reputation.”
“Yesk, yesk, but,” Frazz was quick to point out, “It’z the inna circles that get all the–the, uh…” he searched for what he meant.
“Accolades?”
“Thatz the one, Akker-laidsz! When people talk about hell, they say ‘inna circle’. They say ‘absolute depthsz’. But they don’t know they don’t mean it-t.”
“Come again?”
“It’z like, we’re the part uh hell everybody thinks of, but not the part they mention.”
Tazremmenon, Immortal Tyrant of the Pits of Unenviable Screaming, Revered Blood Lord, shook his head from irritable thoughts. The barbed chains around his wide neck rattled from the motion. *THEY PUNISH THE WORST SINS. WE PUNISH THE WORST SINNERS*
This gave Ashakar pause. The worst sins were almost always done by kings, warlords, people given temporary power after a coup, and annoyingly popular public figures. Some were deservedly responsible, sure, but others were dupes and more still just had jealousy of the gods and other forms of terrible luck putting them in impossible situations.
“That’s true I guess, most of those poor souls were just doing their best.”
“They getz to be frozen in wastelands for et-t-ternity.”
*SIGN ME UP* bellowed Tazremmenon, Immortal Tyrant et al.
Ashakar smirked. Frazz chortled.
“I see what you mean. In these circles we don’t get the serious villains; just the seriously vile. The seconds in command.”
*THE GENERALS. THE ADVISORS*
“Oooh advisors, thoozz are nasty ones.” Frazz rubbed his hands over his arms as the thoughts of such wickedness and their punishments warmed his soulless spirit. The air shimmered and ignited in small flashes from the simple energy produced by it.
“Which brings us back t-to the ice demonz,” Frazz said after collecting himself. “Why iz it they decide to make it hotter here?”
“But that makes sense!”
*Think about it. It must also make sense for them, for it to ever be approved. The heat gives them comfort at the expense of us!* Tazremmenon’s intoning words smashed through their consciousness with slightly less force than usual. The closest he could come to whispering conspiratorially.
Comfort. It still felt like a new concept. 100 thousand years ago, Ashakar couldn’t conceive of the idea, much less the niche definition of “creature comfort” especially as it pertained to heat. Heat just was. Comfort, or the closest thing to it back then, was found in taking down an angel. No wait, that was fury. Rage and savagery that filled one beyond the levels of understanding. It was after a kill, and for a good thousand or so years after, that all who partook in that glory would bask in exhilarating memories of the victory.
It was humans that exposed him to the idea. Their suffering had to be defined in some way, and comfort became a part of that definition. Ashakar was already a being of heat, but with the fires of hell added on top he did recognize that, while suitably unbearable for their charges doomed to suffer, it was not very comfortable to him. He’d seen men become desiccated in front of his eyes from sweating alone. You had to wring them out like a towel to expel the liquids quickly enough, but that was never a problem.
Sometimes he wondered how it would feel to have sweat glands. It seemed nice.
He sighed. “It is bloody fucking hot down here. No offense, Taz.”
*NONE TAKEN*
Frazz sidled up close to Ashakar, “Friend, it-t is unfair, like I said. But me and t-Taz, and others, we’ve been talking. Every ice demon containz a void dimension of absolute zero. Black holez on the m-material plane would be jealous. We have a plan.”
Ashakar regarded the two demons in silence. They watched him levelly.
“They may be the auther-ority of hell, but we want-t to remind them where the real power of hell residez.”
“Frazz, I don’t like where this is going…”
“Don’t have to,” he quipped. ”Do you like where things are going az-iz?”
He fumed and smoldered.
“Keep your fangz in, friend. We will pick an ice demon to capture. Use it-t to cool ourselves. Tzend a message.”
“That could escalate”
*LET IT*
Frazz shrugged and snapped his fingers in an open-handed gesture of simplicity. A flame lept away from him and carried along igniting the air for several meters. “E-z. Therez more of us.”
