Sire! What is happening to you?” croaks a spectacled frog-butler, Trodius. “I don’t understand. Please tell me what to do,” begs the butler. He rushes to his sire aide, crouches beside him, and rests a webbed hand on his Sire’s shoulder.
“Trodius!" calls out his Sire. Twisting his neck, Trodius's Sire looks at him and Trodius inhales sharply, shocked beyond words at the face he beholds – more specifically – at the eye.
"Argh!" shouts his Sire, again, “the pain!”
Violently clutching his left eye, Trodius's Sire – the Asura – buckles over, unable to bear the blazing heat emanating from his left eye.
“My eye!” The Eye of Darkness, sensing this momentary lapse of control, blazes alive with renewed ferocity, hoping to finally overtake its host's body.
“ARGH!” Roars the asura. Slamming his fists into the ground, he unwittingly releases a tidal wave of purple energy. The pulsing purple energy gushes out of him in waves, flooding the surrounding land like a tsunami. The surging tides of pulsing energy affect the zone of gates, which is a massive plot of land where sits the very gates of Hell. This pulsating force first nudges the gates with a gentle push – which in and of itself would be considered a glorius feat of strength – but soon those nudges exponentiates upon one another, growing into a destructive force that shakes the very gates of hell—the outermost gates to be more precise.
Hauling up his heavy head from the ground, the Asura looks westwards, towards the audibly shaking gates of hell. In front of him, westwards, approximately a hundred miles away, sits the seven grand shaking gates of hell. Better known as Passages of Hell. Each passage is fortified with ten doors – double doors – that progressively increase in size, starting from the smallest door whose size matches to that of the biggest American Football field, or three Blue Whales long, upto the last one, whose size towers beyond sight itself.
The Asura can do nothing but watch in horror as the chains that wrap around the outermost door flap about uncontrollably—pushed into motion by his own uncontrolled burst of energy. This violent push and pull of the chain finally snaps it right in the middle.
"No. . ." mouths the Asura—a soundless cry.
The outermost, now unchained, passage/gate – named the Tellurian Gate – swings about in rising intensity. This opens it, momentarily and repeatedly, into gaps wide enough as to allow the Kroxs – lowest tier, tiny demons – to pass through.
The majority of the escaping Kroxs fly freely through the rhythmic opening of those wide gaps, but then, a minority of these attempted escapees desperately squeeze through the oscillating slamming gaps, and finally, a handful of them – the ones that were unable to make it through the slamming gates – get squeezed to obliteration, bursting away into brilliant red and gold flakes of ashes, only to respawn a couple miles back and repeat this process.
“Sire! You have to get a hold of yourself, herds of Krox are escaping through the gate. The mass of mayhem they can cause on Earth in just a few months would take the humans decades to fix. And-"
“I KNOW THAT!" clamors the asura, frustrated at his incapablity to control his own power.
"Sire-" The Asura's irritated right eye silences the butler with a cold look. The Butler, with his mouth open mid-speech, shuts up and follows the trailing gaze of his Sire—both their gazes landing upon the Hall of Artifacts. A hall containing all the artifacts the Asura had collected over the vast millennia of his rule.
The Asura, coughing, says groggily, “Trodius, take the staff of Vildoriya from the Hall of Artifacts, and handle it per protocol. That should be more than enough to close the gates for now.”
With his orders received, the frog frantically springs away to his appointed task, pausing only momentarily on the dias landing to pay attention to his Sire’s groggy warning, “Trodius, remember to use only a tiny fraction of its abilities, the staff would decimate you if you tried to draw out more than one-quarter of its power.” The frog, curtly nodding his comprehension, resumes his springing.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Not even five minutes go by before the pulsating pain of The Eye of Darkness ricochets back with its maximum output of pain, and then some.
Punching a crater into the floor beneath him, the Asura lets loose a truly guttural cry. The spiking levels of demonic energy that the Asura again unwillingly releases – now palpable in its push – shakes five of the seven passages to its very foundational core.
While the other passages tremble vigorously in their place, the inner chains of the Tellurian gate snap open, the inner sixth door now flapping about like the once flapping outermost door. The outstanding force of this snapping open of the four outer doors only adds into the harmony of destruction. And in conclusion, all of this culminates into the snapping open of another of the Seven Passages of Hell.
The outer doors of another passage – the Munandane passage – snap open in a similar manner to that of the Tellurian gate, and following suit with this revelation, hundreds upon thousands of the red-tinged bodies of Kroxs filter out in a single harmonious glee of ecstasy. The very air now shimmers with force – force that exudes not from the crying Asura – but rather from the many mid and high-tier demons that are swarming to the site of the gates, and also from the projection-sensing from the supreme-tier demons.
“TRODIUS!” yells out the Asura. A single, blood-diamond encrusted ring, trails an arc from the Asura’s outstretched arm to the palm of the straining butler, ”Forget what I said. Wear that ring and harness half of the staff's power. DO IT NOW!”
Putting the ring on, the frog begins to siphon out more of the ring's power – and it goes on surprisingly smoothly – until, the demonic energy flow suddenly reverses. A red glow crawls up the cracks along the shaft of the staff, an ominous energy speeding towards Trodius. But, just as the ominous red hued line reaches Trodius’s hand, the blood-diamond ring shines in the same hue of red, absorbing the tiny stream of red into its vast oceans of red.
Staff heaving, chaos unleashing, demons screaming; Trodius finally contains the mess. Both the gate's chains are now restored again, though not bound as tightly as before.
Eyes weaving across the open walled royal court, Trodius spots his Sire, looking more composed than before. Trodius promptly begins to spring over to him, after placing the staff back in the hall of artifacts of course. Now, kneeling on the Dias, Trodius looks up at his Sire.
Sat atop the ethereally nightmare-black throne, the Asura looks ahead, his gaze sharp and cold. Vivid annoyance is painted across the normal eye on his smoldering face. His left eye, on the other hand, is covered by his right hand, beneath which it still blazes on in its ever-expanding flame of pure darkness. The ferocity and intensity of this flame remains unmatched in its magnitude.
The Asura – now more prepared for the wave of pain that is to come – breathes in deep and hard for a long stretch of time, and after exhaling an equally long exhale, he stretches his left arm before him. The arm pulses lightly at first – following which – dots of pure white balls of light exude from the elbow of his arm. These dots then swim up through the crevices of his sculpted, muscled arm, and upon reaching the tips of his fingers, they burst with light, transforming into ethereal flames of white.
Flames as white as snow dance upon the tips of his fingers, and in joining those fingertips, he produces a light that is truly blinding in its brightness. He then plunges that blinding flame into his left eye, effectively extinguishing the flames of darkness—a feat not many can accomplish.
Sighing loudly, he confides within Trodius, one of his very few trusted companions, "Trudy, rare are the times when I truly, viscerally, hate my insatiable thirst for power. This is one of those rare times." Eyes rounded in concentration, Trodius listens to his Sire in rapt attention, as if he's committing to memory all that his tacitum Sire says.
Complain he may, about his insatiable thirst for power, but these very inclinations are what got him through the regenerative nothingness of hell – a place where life means nothing; the residents their own torturers, and where each day is a hellish repeat of the last – and so, it was these very inclinations that made him strive through that vast nothingness, and helped position him into this grand position of power. The position granted the title 'The Grand Overseer of Hell'.
"Trodius, fetch me Lokius and Gargantuous. Shortly brief them about the disaster that has struck, and tell them that they've been summoned” the Asura says. Trodius is about to turn when he holds one finger up in warning. He adds, “Do this very discreetly, Trodius, I don't want the others to know, not yet at least." After receiving the curt nod of complete understanding from Trodius, the Asura further continues.
"Then, after you have brought them, and before the meeting begins, provide us with a detailed report of: the number of demons that escaped, their respective tier, exactly how many of them escaped, and into which Gate. We need to limit the consequences of this event as soon as possible." Waiting only to listen to the entirety of the order, Trodius now hops away, single-mindedly focused on the task appointed.
Landing on the last slab of the throne room, Trodius rounds the corner, disappearing. With the frog-butler out of sight, the Asura finally winces at the last wisps of pain. He did not wish to appear weak in front of his subjects. The Asura now dives inwards, observing the last embers of the Eye of Darkness sizzle out of existence. The extinguished eye now floats in the darkness of hollow space, where it shall remain inactive for the foreseeable future, an hopefully forever.
Coming out of his introspection, he stares forward, intently, and reaffirms to himself. "This is going to be one hell of a clean-up."