It was a long ride down to Forty Feet Under.

Pel had never really understood why they needed to have a dive bar underneath the building, nor, for that matter, why her mother was so fond of it. The whole idea of the dive bar just rubbed Pel the wrong way. It wasn’t right for people to be that deep underground, far away from the Sun.

Finally, with a shudder, the elevator came to a stop.

The first thing Pel noticed was the smell: an overpowering, sickly sweet odor with an almost citrusy tang, and she noticed it before the elevator doors had even opened. It made her eyes water and her throat itch as it percolated through the doors.

Then the doors slid open.

Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw.

She screamed.

The dive bar was now a den of serpents, filled with demons in various stages of transformation. The one behind the counter seemed almost human, what with his human chest and human head, and human hands and arms—even if they were speckled in steely scales that matched the ones that framed his face. But it was a false appearance, just skin being shed. His hair was falling away, and his eyes were pupil-less and golden. The lower half of his body showed the truth: he had no legs or thighs, just a thick Norm tail, coiled beneath him.

The others were so much worse, as was the bar itself.

The bar floor’s tables and chairs had been pushed up against the back wall to make room for a gruesome abattoir. Pieces of dead zombies—ripped, or torn—lay on the floor in sizable piles. Every once in a while, one of them would twitch or gurgle. Several figures knelt beside the piles of the corrupted dead, feasting on the zombies. Pel saw them change as they ate.

Their bodies twitched with growth.

She closed her eyes to try to make it go away, but she could still hear it. Sounds of creeping flesh, and of scales brushing against the floor.

Moans like revelers at an orgy.

“Holy shit!” Jules said. The scream startled Pel’s eyes open. “Holy shit! Holy sh—”

Jules and Pel’s fuss drew the attention of a maroon-scaled Norm who was coiled around a small table in the corner of the room. Rearing up like a cobra, he accidentally bumped his head into the ceiling, gouging holes into the drywall with his obsidian horns. His muscle-corded arms ended in sharply clawed, three-fingered hands.

And he wasn’t alone.

A vaguely feminine figure lay beside him, her lengthening body entwined around his, her red scales against his maroon. The she-Norm’s legs were blackened husks that left crumbs on the floor whenever she moved. Her arms were monstrous, even larger than the male’s.

On instinct, Pel stepped in front of Jules and Rayph, motioning with her arm for them to move behind her.

Bits of zombie floated through the air, moving in and out of the kitchen’s doorless entryway like goods at a haunted factory. Every few seconds, one of the pieces would haphazardly collide with the wide-mouthed glasses that dangled upside-down from cords attached to the ceiling. The shadows cast by the LEDs mounted to bottoms of the jars rocked side to side as the jars swung from the impacts. Many of the jars were broken, their glass’ jagged glass edges slicing through the air like fangs.

Pel cupped her hand over her mouth as she made the Bond-sign once more. “Demons!” she cried. “D-Demons!”

The steel-colored Norm behind the counter looked at her for a moment, and then turned away and stuck out an arm, causing a chunk of infected flesh to rise up from one of the heaps on the floor. He grabbed it once it floated into his grasp, and then stuck it into his mouth, sucking on it like a dog on a bone.

“Angel!” Pel screamed. “Angel!”

Yet none of the demons seemed concerned in the slightest.

Pel’s mind fired on all cylinders, desperate to outrun her boiling panic. She looked around for something she could use to defend herself—a weapon, a tool, anything.

“Come on now,” Eyvan said, stepping up behind her. “Let’s not keep everyone waiting.”

Pel felt him nudge her forward.

Shrieking, she spun around and smacked him in the face, using her knuckles in a backhand strike that made him yelped in pained surprise. While he was still stunned, Pel jammed her knee into his crotch and clawed her fingernails into his face.

Pel didn’t need fingernail extensions to feel she looked good, but what a difference they would have made, had she had them here. Still, her strike crumpled Eyvan, sending him to his knees, which gave her the opportunity to pull the kids behind her and shove Eyvan into the elevator.

If we survive, she thought, I can beat the crap out of him later.

But the next thing she knew, an invisible force had grabbed her and lifted her off the ground. She struggled against it, flailing and kicking, but its grip quickly enveloped her whole body, until she could move her head and nothing else.

She could no longer feel the support of the ground beneath her.

Hearing Rayph scream, Pel whipped her head around to see he and Jules had been immobilized just like her. All three of them were floating in the air. Their feet dangled several inches over the dive bar’s floor.

The force holding Pel slowly turned her around, bringing her to face the rest of the room.

Then the maroon Norm looked her in the eyes. “Now hold on, lady,” he said, his voice eerie and resonant.

Pel froze.

The demon was actually talking to her. She noticed he was holding up one of hands.

“It’s not polite to start beating people up out of the blue like that,” the Norm added.

Pel trembled.

“Cat got your tongue?” the Norm said.

“I think she’s just in shock,” the red female said.

“Mom!” Jules yelled. “Mom!”

Finally, Pel found her tongue. “What are you doing to us?!” she screamed. “Where is my mother?!”

“Mother?” the maroon asked.

Pel heard groans behind her. She wanted to look over her shoulder to look, but she couldn’t. He started to speak “She’s…” but then he groaned again, and coughed before he finally got the words out.

“She’s Margaret’s daughter,” he said.

“Oh…” the maroon said.

Pel could have sworn she felt the weight of all the eyes in the room turning toward her and the kids. That feeling drowned her, and she kept drowning in it until a familiar voice shook her out of her daze.

“Alright, what the hell is going on?”

It was her mother, and it had come from the kitchen behind the counter. Her mother’s voice sounded richer than it should have, and was accompanied by grunting noises, along with the shuffles, scrapes, and squeaks of something being dragged across the floor.

The maroon Norm turned his head to the kitchen. “Eyvan’s back, Ma’am,” he said. “He brought your family.”

Then another voice spoke. It sent shivers down Pel’s spine, even though she’d never heard it before.

“Well, Margaret,” he said, with an otherworldly resonance, “I believe it is time to show yourself.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

With or without the resonance, it was a striking voice. It was firm and commanding, and instantly memorable.

“I could use a little help, Your Holiness,” Margaret said.

A mustard-yellow demon with a short, thick tail that filled the space between his weakening legs craned his neck toward the kitchen entryway. “I don’t think she’ll fit,” he said. “It’s too narrow.”

The alluring voice chuckled softly. “My child… with God, all things are possible.”

“Mom, what’s happening?” Jules said. “What the hell is going on?”

Rayph just cried.

Suddenly, the drywall around the kitchen’s entryway loudly cracked. On either side of the opening, vertical strips of wall ripped themselves away, immediately doubling the size of the entryway. The two strips floated to the middle of the room where they broke up into several decent-sized fragments that promptly clattered onto the floor.

A great turd of a creature floated out through the opening, hovering several inches above the floor. The patches of scales that covered its pallid flesh were the color of phlegm: sickly white with the vaguest hint of green.

The demons among the corpse piles used their powers to move bits of zombie out of the way, clearing a spot in the middle of the room, where the creature settled down a moment later.

No, Pel thought, not “the creature”.

Mom.

Jules shrieked.

Pel’s tongue swelled in her throat. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. Her heart hammered against her ribs.

The demon wearing her mother’s skin was a slug with a face, arms and breasts. The upper half of her torso strained against her stained blouse, while her legs were stubby blackheads protruding from the back of her body. Her arms were twice the length of what they’d once been, and were bony and distended, like a frog’s legs, and with claws that dwarfed her fat, grubby hands.

Nodding, the demon grinned—a big, toothy smile. Black ichor stained her teeth, and you could have mistaken the spores encrusted around her lips for powdered sugar, dyed in green.

“Hello, dear,” she said.

For Pel, those words were rock bottom. This had to be the worst of all possible worlds. Truly, a hell on earth.

And then, it got worse.

All the demons in the room bowed their heads toward the entryway as a figure trudged out from the kitchen, shuffling along the floor. A demon’s hand stuck out of the opening, grasping the hole in the wall. It was wickedly clawed, and tiled in tiny scales the color of jaundice and pus.

“No!” Pel cried. “No! No! No!”

Looking up at the ceiling, Pel closed her eyes and prayed. “O Holy Sun, O Holy Sun / please let me know thy grace to come / for through thy face, I yearn to go / when Night’s erased and sin atoned.”

“What is that?!” Rayph cried.

Pel shut her eyes as hard as she could. “By Angel’s blood, I am redeemed—“

But the voice interrupted her.

“—You need not pray any longer, Pelbrum,” he said. “I can assure you,” he continued, “your prayers have been answered. I am here to do the Angel’s will.”

With words like that, Pel couldn’t not look.

If I’m going to be damned, she thought, I should at least look my damnation in the face before it swallows me whole.

Opening her eyes, she saw a figure—a mix of man, lizard, and serpent, all rolled into one.

And he was wearing the Hummingbird Robe.

He was a snake with limbs, forced into a permanent crouch by the way his legs jutted out from his flanks. His rotting thighs bulged against the Hummingbird Robe’s iridescent, blue-green cassock. The sacred garment was riddled with burnt-edge holes, eaten away by flecks of black ooze and green spores. His neck was distended, an S-shape curve that bobbed around when he moved or looked about. One of his hands was still partially human, while the other was the demon’s claw, massive and monstrous.

And his face…

Pel gasped.

Not only was it still human, she recognized it. Anyone would.

It was the same face as the one in the famous Verdinset portrait that hung in the halls of the Melted Palace’s halls. For a maddened moment, Pel wondered which of the two faces would look more true to life if you put them side by side.

“No…” Pel muttered. She felt faint. “No, please… no…”

Behind her, she heard Eyvan clear his throat.

Stepping forward, the young man knelt on the ground, with his head held low.

“Ms. Revenel,” he said, “may I present his Holiness, Mordwell Verune, 250th Lassedite.”

Pel’s breath curdled in the back of her throat.

“I am Lassedite no longer, Mr. Midspew,” Verune said. “The Church is of the Lass, and the Lassedites followed in Her footsteps. We march to the beat of a greater drum. The old Church is dead; its purpose fulfilled. We are the new Church, the Last Church, and we are a Church without end.”

Pel didn’t know what to think.

Perhaps this really had been Lassedite Verune, long, long ago. But that was then. Now, he was an arch-demon. A Norm among Norms.

Or… was he?

The Last Days were here; Pel was certain of that. These horrors were living proof positive. But proof was not prophecy.

The world had stepped onto untrodden ground.

The Last Days had always been shrouded in mystery. Scriptures never described it at length, and what little lore was known about it was uncertain, contradictory, and arcane.

Pel had never thought about what would happen to the Church once the Last Days had come. No one had.

“Now now,” Verune said, addressing the other demons, “you need not lower your heads any longer.” Bringing his hand to his chest, Verune pressed his inhuman hand onto the Hummingbird robe. “We are divine beasts. We all have a role to play in the Last Days. None of us is greater than the others. I am but a first among equals, and ever the Angel’s faithful servant.”

“W-What…?” Pel muttered. “Divine beasts?” She shook her head. “You’re insane!”

“Is that truly what you think?” he said. “Is that what you see?”

“You’re monsters, all of you!” Pel yelled.

Verune sighed, breathing out faint, green plumes. His expression fell. “It is… unfortunate that you say that. It seems you are not among the righteous.”

“Now, your Holiness,” Margaret said, “just hold on a minute.”

Pel didn’t know which impossible happening was harder for her to wrap her mind around: the fact that her mother was turning into one of those serpents, or that she had dared to contradict the wearer of the Hummingbird Robe.

Lost Lassedite or not, only a fool would take this Verune lightly.

The Lassedite motioned at himself once more, locking eyes with Pel. “We are mirrors for the soul, Ms. Revenel, as are all that come from the divine. As with the Witnesses who recalled in horror at Angelfall, when you stare into the divine, you see your true self reflected black. Only a monster would look at the stuff of God and call it monstrous.”

“Verune,” Margaret said, gesturing with a distended arm, “Pel is often a fool, and she’s as stubborn as her father was, but… she’s no dummy.” Margaret nodded at her. “She’ll come around, I know she will. Maybe even my grandkids, too.” Margaret smiled. “I mean, look, I got her to stop listening to that faggot atheist husband of hers and come here, where it’s safe.”

Verune nodded. “If that is what you feel, I shall leave them in your care,” he said. He bowed at Pel. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Pelbrum,” he said. “For your sake, I hope you will choose the Light. The Angel’s mercy is greater than any of us can understand, least of all sinners like ourselves.”

The creature in the Hummingbird robe waddled back into the kitchen. Pel heard a metal door squeal open and shut.

Jules broke the silence. “S-Safe?” she said, stammering indignantly.

Margaret nodded. “Absolutely.” She flopped an arm toward her chest. “Us divine beasts are the only ones who can take down the zombies. It’s our duty. We devour them. They are evil. We destroy evil.” She grinned. “How do you think I got like this?”

“You’re not my mother!” Pel cried.

Beside her, Jules scoffed, even as tears slicked her cheeks. “Uh, no. Mom, that’s totally Grandma,” she said. “She finally looks as awful on the outside as she is on the inside.”

Margaret scowled. “Jules, dear,” she said, “I’m only gonna say this once: you better stop talking trash about me right now, young lady, or else. Being my blood grants you certain privileges, obviously, but they won’t save you from getting your just desserts.”

Pel trembled in her invisible vise. The creature talked just like her mother would. It was a perfect simulacrum of her mother’s personality.

“M-Mom…?” she muttered. “Is there anything still left of you in there? Or has the Norm taken over?”

“Pel,” Margaret said, “you’re being stupid right now. You’re supposed to be the brains in this family, sweetie, but here you are, acting like your beasteaten husband. Stop it.” She flicked the end of her short, stubby tail. “I’m still me. I’m still the woman who pushed you out into the world. I’m your father’s wife and your children’s grandmother. Always was, always will be. But,” she stretched out an arm, “I’m also becoming something more than that. The Hallowed Beast is infusing us with Its power.” Margaret glanced at the others. “Believe me when I say we’re becoming something wonderful. I mean… I used to be human, myself. I know what it’s like. Compared to what I’m becoming, the person I once was was as blind as a bat.”

Without looking away, Pel shook her head. “I almost believe you,” she said, her voice breaking.

“Good,” Margaret said, “now just go the rest of the way. Join us. You’ll get Paradise, I promise you, and you won’t even have to shed your human skin. The Angel will take you just as you are. You just gotta believe. The Last Church is going to be pulling the ropes from here to Paradise. We’ll be taking the righteous souls across the rainbow in no-time.”

“Grandma,” Jules said, “you’ve lost your mind if you think Mom is going to listen to any of this.”

“I sure hope not,” Margaret said, narrowing her eyes. “Pel, Jules, Rayph, sweethearts,” she gestured around, “this world is toast. Hell’s on the march, and we’re the only ones with the power to keep you safe. For your sake, I just hope you and the kids are smart enough to ante the faith you’ll need if you want to survive.”

Margaret glanced at the maroon serpent. “Put them in one of the holding cells, Steyphan. Ask Henrichy to talk to them. Hopefully, he’ll be able to talk some sense into them.”

Pel and the kids were incapable of resisting Steyphan’s powers as he levitated them into the kitchen. All they could do was scream and yell. Steyphan lowered his head as he slithered past them and opened a thick, metal door beside a cupboard that had been slid away from the wall.

Pel had been in the bar’s kitchen once before. She’d never seen that door.

With a wave of his hand, Steyphan floated them through the door, into rooms and hallways splattered with death and gore. They passed feasting demons and diced-up zombies. Pel gawked at the sight of perfectly human beings packing guns and worse into containers and crates.

What in the world…? she thought.

They turned down a claustrophobic corridor that dead ended in a reinforced door with a narrow viewing port in it.

Steyphan levitated them toward it.

“If you change your mind,” he said, “there’s a console in that room that you can use to voice your repentance. But,” he waggled his finger at them, “no funny business, or you’ll regret it.”

The door at the end of the hall swung open with a metal groan as Steyphan floated Pel and the kids through the doorway and launched them at the ground. The Norm used his powers to cushion the impact, but only slightly. Rug fibers rasped against Pel’s skin as she slid to a stop.

The door slammed shut before she could even rise to her feet.