Zeke focused inward, funneling the tiny trickle of divine energy into something approaching a pattern. It resisted his efforts at control, but that was to be expected. It was a thing of gods, after all, and he was only a mortal.
“For now,” Eveline reminded him.
He ignored her, preferring instead to concentrate on moving that energy. It shifted a little, but despite his constant effort, it soon spun out of his control, flooding throughout his body and doing a significant amount of damage. Harnessing a bit of that same energy, he powered his skill, [Hand of Divinity], healing himself. However, his efforts again proved inadequate, leaving echoes of agony to ripple through his body and soul.
Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “I think I’m getting better.”
“It’s hard to tell,” Eveline admitted in a skeptical tone. “I know you’re trying, but…”
“Don’t say it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she lied, her tone the very picture of innocence.
“Sure.”
Despite literally hearing his every thought, Eveline just didn’t understand why moving the divine energy was so difficult. She could barely even sense it, except as a dense foreboding hanging in the air. She knew it was powerful, and she knew that if Zeke managed to harness it, he could destroy her with barely a thought. Yet, knowing and seeing were two different things, and she’d been forced to take his descriptions on faith. For a demon – or former demon, Zeke supposed – that was a tall order.
He took a deep breath, then said, “I think we need to move on. I’ll keep trying to control it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to sit between circles like this. I keep feeling like something terrible is going to happen.”
“I think that’s a given regardless of what you do from here on out. It’s Hell, Ezekiel. Terrible is kind of what it’s all about,” she explained.
“Thank you for your insight,” he deadpanned as he set off down the steps. They looked no different from any other steps he’d ever descended, yet with every inch of progress, he felt the air grow denser with churning mana. At first, it was barely noticeable, but after only a few dozen feet, he couldn’t ignore it.
Or the hunger it elicited inside of him.
Idly, he reached into his storage space, grabbing some meat. Before he even realized what he was doing, he was tearing into the raw flesh. Then, suddenly, he stopped and looked down at his impromptu meal.
There were two issues at play, and they were equally troubling, though in different ways. First, his storage space was suddenly open to him. That was great news, but it seemed that only food was available.
And Voromir, but it functioned on entirely different rules. No matter what else happened, his hammer was always there.
The second – and more obvious – issue was the fact that he’d started eating raw meat without even thinking about it. Given the nature of the next circle – which Eveline had said was almost assuredly related to the sin of gluttony – it should have been expected. However, he’d not even fully descended, and it was already affecting him. Even as he stood there, hunger twisted his stomach into knots, begging him to eat the raw and red meat still clutched in his hand.
The fact that Hell – or whatever entity ran the Pit itself – kept messing with his access to the Crimson Tower felt more like a violation than anything that had been done to his mind or body. It wasn’t just a piece of him. Rather, it was tied to his very soul in an inextricable and inexplicable way. That anything would alter his connection to it was enough to elicit a growl of anger.
He threw the meat to the ground, where it hit the steps in a wet splat.
“They want hunger? I’ll give them hunger,” he muttered to himself.
“What are you doing?”
Zeke didn’t answer. Instead, he marched down the stairs, energy swirling around him like a typhoon. Some of it came from him in the form of a diffuse cloud of diluted divine energy that had been filtered through his body, but the majority of that tornado of energy came from the ambient mana. He sank into it, letting it infuse him with all the hunger it could force upon him.
It gnawed at his belly and infected his mind, but now that Zeke had experienced it, he didn’t let it affect his actions. Instead, he funneled it into the great pit of rage and his violent nature, where it was transformed into a hunger that food could never sate. He wanted to kill something. To destroy it utterly. And he descended those steps, aiming to give the hunger what it so desperately wanted.
After all, gluttony came in many forms. Sometimes, it was linked to food or drink, but at others, it was epitomized by overindulgence in all sorts of vices, ranging from drugs to destructive behaviors. Zeke embraced the last.
He didn’t have many true vices, but violence was definitely one of them.
After a few thousand yards of steps, Zeke finally reached the bottom of the steps, where he found something he did not expect. It was a mundane door, not unlike one might see in an upscale home. He pushed through it, ready for any attacks that might come his way, but nothing presented itself.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Instead, he saw a suburban house that would have been at home in a nineties, multi-camera sitcom.
“Welcome!” came a feminine voice. The moment Zeke beheld the owner of that voice, his rage melted away.
“M-mom?”
His own voice cracked with that single utterance. She looked just like she did in his memories, though far healthier. Less worn down by life. Her cheeks weren’t as hollow, and her eyes didn’t have any bags beneath them. Tommy’s illness had taken quite a toll on all of them, and she was no exception. In fact, aside from Tommy himself, she’d gotten the worst of it, largely because the burden of taking care of him had fallen mostly to her. To do so, she’d been forced to work too-long hours in a series of thankless jobs.
She hadn’t really been old, back then.
“What is it, son?” she asked, concerned.
“I…I just realized something. I’m older now than you were when I died.”
There was more than a little ambiguity about how much time had passed. Often, he thought of his time in the troll caves as being around two years, but there was every possibility that his estimate was extremely wrong. Back then, there was no day-night cycle to mark the passage of time, and he certainly hadn’t been in any mental state to keep accurate track. So, it could have just as easily been longer.
But he didn’t think it was less than two.
Regardless, it had been long enough since his death that he thought his previous statement was close to accurate. It was an odd thing to realize, and it left him with a hollow dread deep in the pit of his stomach.
“Nonsense. Wash your hands and come to dinner. Everyone’s waiting.”
Zeke looked down at his hands, which were still covered in dried blood from the raw meat he’d just eaten. On top of that, most of his clothes were gone, leaving him wearing nothing more than a pair of pants that were barely holding on. Finally, his beard and hair had grown out of control, leaving him looking like a shipwrecked castaway.
And not the sanitized Hollywood version.
He was also filthy.
In something of a daze, he followed his mother’s instructions, heading into the house and to the bathroom. His feet led the way of their own accord, like he’d walked that path a thousand times.
But it was not his house.
Back on Earth, their house had been old and creaky and barely big enough for the three of them. By comparison, this was a mansion, and a perfectly clean one as well. Zeke felt guilty, tracking dirty and sand and blood along the pristine, hardwood floors. Eventually, he reached the bathroom where he finally got a look at himself in the mirror.
He looked a lot worse than he’d realized.
Apparently, he could go without food, rest, or water, but there were consequences for going down that route. He had lost a ton of weight, leaving him with a lean and stringy physique more befitting someone who ran super marathons than the athletic body he’d cultivated through his struggles. On top of that, his cheeks were hollow, and his eyes sat far back in his skull, giving him a slightly skull-like appearance.
His body was also crisscrossed with a dense pattern of scars. In most cases, he didn’t remember the wounds that had created those marks, but that wasn’t abnormal. He’d been in a daze for much of his time in Hell – whether it was the Plains of the Forgotten or the Tempest – and the fact that he didn’t remember all of the wounds inflicted upon him was not surprising.
What did shock him was the sheer volume.
Barely a single inch of his chest was unmarred. Not even his face had escaped unscathed, with a couple of long, jagged marks running along his cheek. Unsurprisingly, his back hadn’t gotten it nearly as bad, and it lacked any major scars.
He didn’t make a habit of running from his problems, after all.
As always, the cracks in the skin on his shoulders and upper chest remained just as prominent as ever, though at present, they lacked the glow they displayed when he used his Will. Perhaps that was a thing of the past, considering that his Will and mana had combined into divine energy.
In any case, Zeke soon found himself using some liquid soap to scrub the dried blood from his hands. For good measure, he washed his face as well, though the combined effort ended up taking him almost ten minutes of furious scrubbing. When he was done, he left the bathroom behind and, as if his feet had a mind of their own, quickly ended up in the dining room.
When he arrived, his jaw once again dropped in shock.
Not only was his mother there, looking like the perfect picture of a content housewife, but both his brother and his father had taken their seats as well. Even his uncle had come.
But none of them looked the way they should have.
His father didn’t have the paunch he’d developed from drinking too much beer and spending too many afternoons planted in his rickety, old recliner and watching sports. Tommy looked better than he ever had in life, with a healthy glow about him that had never been present before.
In fact, he looked taller and more muscular than he had back then. Like he was an athletic boy on the cusp of beginning his journey into manhood. It was what Tommy could have been if he hadn’t been so sick for so long.
Even his uncle looked like a movie star version of the man he knew.
It was surreal and, in a lot of ways, moving. It was like getting a peek into the lives they could have led, the people they could have been.
“Sit, sit – dinner is almost read!” his mother said. As he followed her directions, taking a seat opposite his brother, she continued, “You’re always out galivanting across the realms. We never get to see you anymore. Or that pretty girl you’ve been seeing. What was her name again? Adara. Right. When can I expect some grandchildren, huh?”
“Don’t answer that,” his father said with a chuckle. “It’s a trap.”
It was that statement – so far from anything his real father might’ve uttered – that broke the spell. Zeke refocused his mind, unsure of how he was meant to react.
“Should I just leave?” he asked in his mind. But Eveline was silent.
A moment later, his mother reappeared from the kitchen, carrying two huge platters. When she set them down, Zeke saw that one contained an enormous, still-steaming turkey. The other bore a bowl full of chicken and dumplings. He was still staring at them – his mouth watering – when she returned a minute or so later with two more platters. The first had green bean casserole, and the second featured cornbread slathered in butter.
The smells dragged him back into the delusion he’d only just escaped.
Only a moment later, his mother slid into her own seat, then said, “Alright – we’re all supposed to go around and say what their thankful for. I’ll start us off. I’m thankful for my wonderful family, my loving husband, and the circumstances that allowed us all to get together for Thanksgiving.”
A chorus of agreement followed before each member of the family rattled off their own version of what she’d just said. When it got to Zeke, he mumbled something about family, but his eyes were glued to the meal spread out before him. Each dish represented some of his favorite memories – usually from his early childhood before things went wrong with his family – and he couldn’t help but be distracted by it.
However, the illusion of a big, happy family was once again shattered when he heard his father say, “I’m most thankful for my two sons. They’re my life. I love you two more than I can say.”
That, more than anything else, drove a spike of awareness through Zeke’s mind, cementing that it was not real. After all, his selfish bastard of a father would never have said anything like that. Not in a million years.