Xeos died.
His body remained on the golden floor of his castle, but he—his essence, his self—departed. Death, for most, was the end. For mages, it was merely a transformation. The stronger the mage, the more complex the transition from flesh to spirit. And Xeos had been among the strongest.
He floated in a sea of nothingness, aware yet formless. The process had begun. His consciousness stretched and compressed, his memories rearranged themselves into new patterns, his very identity struggled to maintain cohesion as the energies of his millennia-old body released into the spiritual realm.
A lesser mage would have completed this transformation in moments, their spirit forming quickly before being drawn to whatever afterlife their actions had earned them. But Xeos was no ordinary mage. The energies contained within him—accumulated over thousands of years of existence—fought against the natural order.
Divine energy pulsed through what remained of him, a golden light that pushed upward, seeking to elevate him beyond mortal constraints. This was the energy he had absorbed from countless rituals, from communion with celestial bodies, from the very act of living so far beyond a human lifespan. His spirit contained enough divinity to power a small pantheon of demigods.
Yet intertwined with this golden radiance was a darker force. Anti-divine energy, black and viscous, coiled through him like serpents. This was the power he had used to contain The Lose, to bind the lesser god for millennia. It was energy born of defiance against the natural order, power that rejected the very concept of divinity while mirroring its strength.
These opposing forces warred within him, neither gaining supremacy. And so he remained in limbo, a spirit unable to fully form, consciousness adrift in the void between realms.
Time held no meaning in this state. It might have been seconds or centuries that he drifted, formless and waiting. Then, gradually, he became aware of movement. Upward. He was being drawn upward.
The divine energy within him responded to some external call, vibrating with recognition. Golden tendrils extended from his essence, reaching toward something above. Whatever force called to him was of similar nature to the divinity within him, harmonious in its frequency.
He understood, with the clarity that comes only in death, what was happening. The Heavens sensed the divine energy within his spirit and sought to claim it. To claim him.
In life, The Heavens recognized those with divine potential—those who, through deed or bloodline, carried some spark of the celestial. When such individuals died, their spirits were drawn upward, through the celestial hierarchies. They became angels if their divinity was modest, celestials if it was significant. The most divine could even ascend to become Absolutes, the lesser gods of Heaven.
Xeos had carried enough divinity within him to guarantee ascension to at least celestial status. Perhaps, given his power and longevity, he might have even approached the threshold of becoming an Absolute. He would serve The Heavens, a powerful entity but still subordinate to the great god that ruled the realm.
As his formless spirit drifted upward, Xeos became aware of the space around him changing. The void gave way to light, at first distant pinpricks like stars, then growing brighter, coalescing into patterns. Faces formed in the light, watching him with interest as he ascended.
Angels. The lowest of the highest order of Heaven's hierarchy, yet still beings of immense power by mortal standards. They observed his passage, some with curiosity, others with what seemed like concern. They did not interfere with his ascent. They could not, for the divine energy within him outmatched their own.
Higher he drifted, beyond the realm of angels. The light grew more intense, more structured. Patterns of geometric perfection surrounded him, crystalline formations that hummed with power. This was the domain of the celestials, the beings that mortals often worshipped as gods. Their attention focused on him now, a chorus of whispered thoughts brushing against his consciousness.
*So much divinity for a mortal soul...*
*Yet tainted with something darker...*
*What manner of being comes to us?*
They communicated without words, concepts and emotions flowing directly from their essence to his. He felt their power, greater than that of the angels below but still bounded, still defined by their service to The Heavens.
Above them, still distant but growing nearer, pulsed seven distinct lights. The Absolutes, the true lesser gods of Heaven. Each embodied a divine concept, a fundamental aspect of celestial reality. Justice. Mercy. Wisdom. Valor. Faith. Hope. Love. Unlike the demons of Hell, who represented the corruption of mortal virtue, these beings represented its perfection.
And beyond them, beyond the seven lights, lay something so vast it defied comprehension. A presence that permeated everything, that existed in and through all the lesser entities of Heaven. The Heavens itself—the great god, the sentient realm that contained all the others.
Xeos's spirit continued its ascent, drawn inexorably upward. The celestials parted before him, their crystalline forms shifting to create a path. The seven lights of the Absolutes grew brighter, their attention fixed upon him now. He was approaching the threshold, the boundary beyond which lay the court of Heaven's lesser gods.
And then he stopped.
Something pulled at him, a counterforce to the divine attraction. The anti-divine energy within him responded to a call of its own, thrumming with dark resonance.
Above him, a hole opened in reality. Not a physical aperture, for this realm had no physicality as mortals understood it. Rather, it was an absence, a negation of the light and order that defined The Heavens. A void that consumed the celestial radiance around it.
A black hole in the fabric of spiritual reality. A direct connection to The Abyss.
Just as The Heavens sought spirits imbued with divinity, so too did The Abyss hunger for those touched by anti-divine energy. The power Xeos had used to contain The Lose had marked him, claimed a portion of his spirit for the realm of chaos and transformation.
The pull from above intensified. The seven lights of the Absolutes flared with power, fighting to draw him fully into their domain. But the black hole pulsed in response, its gravity spiritual rather than physical, tugging at the darkness within Xeos.
He was suspended between forces, caught in a tug-of-war between realms. The golden light of divinity and the black oil of anti-divinity stretched in opposite directions, threatening to tear his spirit apart.
The Heavens offered order, hierarchy, purpose. As a celestial or even an Absolute, he would serve the structural integrity of the cosmos. He would be powerful beyond mortal comprehension, but forever bound by the rules of divine existence.
The Abyss offered chaos, transformation, freedom. In the realm of void beings and constant change, he would be unbound by structure or expectation. He could reshape himself endlessly, explore the furthest limits of spiritual mutation. But he would never know stability or peace.
Neither option aligned with his purpose. Neither path would lead him to what he sought. He needed a third way, a different destination.
As if in answer to his unformed thought, the spiritual realm around him changed again. The golden light dimmed, the celestial patterns fading. Even the black hole seemed to lose its definition, its edges blurring into the surrounding space.
Color leached from everything. The radiant gold of The Heavens, the depthless black of The Abyss, both faded to gray. The spiritual landscapes flattened, lost dimension and detail. It was as if reality itself was being drained of essence.
Then, without warning, heat. Not physical warmth, but its spiritual equivalent. A burning that consumed without destroying, that transformed without changing. The gray world around him turned red, then orange, then white with intensity.
The burning was not painful. Instead, it was clarifying. Through it, Xeos perceived what was happening with perfect understanding.
A third force had entered the contest for his spirit. A power neither divine nor anti-divine, but of a different nature entirely. A power older than Heaven, older even than The Abyss in its current form. The primordial force from which all others had ultimately derived.
Hell.
Not merely the realm of punishment and torment, as mortals conceived it. Not simply the domain of demons and sinners. Hell in its true form, as one of the three great gods, one of the three fundamental aspects of spiritual reality.
Heaven represented divine order. The Abyss represented chaotic transformation. But Hell represented something else entirely: inevitability. The absolute certainty that all things, no matter how powerful or divine, would eventually succumb to entropy, to dissolution, to an ending.
In the mortal realm, this manifested as death. In the spiritual realms, it manifested as Hell.
A hand emerged from the burning whiteness. Not a physical appendage, but a conceptual one, a manifestation of Hell's will to claim what it deemed its own. The hand was enormous beyond measure, larger than island, larger than continents, large enough to encompass entire worlds.
And yet it moved with surprising gentleness as it closed around Xeos's spirit.
He did not resist. He had known this would happen. Had counted on it, in fact. The deal he had made with Sloth ensured this outcome. The Seven Deadly Sins were not merely demon lords or lesser gods of Hell. They were its fundamental aspects, its primary expressions. A deal with one of them was a deal with Hell itself.
And deals with Hell were binding beyond the power of any other force in existence. Not even The Heavens could overrule them. Not even The Abyss could subvert them.
The hand closed fully, enveloping Xeos's spirit. The burning whiteness intensified, then collapsed inward, taking him with it. The last vestiges of Heaven's light and The Abyss's void vanished, replaced by the red-orange glow of hellfire.
He was falling now, descending through layers of spiritual reality so fundamentally different from those he had just left that they might as well exist in separate universes. There was structure here, but not the geometric perfection of Heaven. There was chaos, but not the formless potential of The Abyss. There was a terrifying, beautiful order to the chaos, a pattern to the dissolution.
As he fell, he became aware of other spirits falling alongside him. Some were recent arrivals, like himself, their essences still raw from the transition from life to death. Others had been here much longer, their spiritual forms shaped by eons of existence within Hell's domain.
They fell together, a rain of souls descending toward some unknown destination. Occasionally, winged forms would swoop through their midst, plucking spirits from the downward flow. Demons, servants of Hell's lesser gods, harvesting those souls marked for special attention.
None approached Xeos. His spirit remained untouched during the long descent. He knew why; he was marked already, claimed for a specific purpose. The demons recognized this claim and left him to his fate.
The descent ended abruptly. One moment he was falling through a limitless expanse of red-orange light; the next, he stood on solid ground. Or what passed for ground in this realm. A dark, reflective surface stretched in all directions, like polished obsidian. The sky above, if it could be called a sky, pulsed with veins of fire that ran through black stone.
He looked down at himself, surprised to find that his spirit had taken form. He had a body again, of sorts. It resembled his mortal shell in general outline, but the details were blurred, indistinct. Golden light still pulsed within him, visible through his semi-translucent skin. Threads of anti-divine darkness wound through the gold, creating a marbled effect.
But these energies were contained now, bound within his new spiritual form. They no longer reached outward, no longer responded to the calls of Heaven or The Abyss. Hell had claimed all of him, integrated all of his energies into its own structures.
He was not alone on the obsidian plain. Thousands of other spirits stood nearby, each with a similar half-formed appearance. Some glowed predominantly with the golden light of divinity, others with the black oil of anti-divinity. Most contained a mixture of energies, though few in proportions as equal as his own.
Beyond the gathered spirits stood enormous structures: towering spires of black stone shot through with veins of molten fire, colossal furnaces from which poured heat and light, vast mechanisms of unclear purpose grinding with inexorable force. This was not the Hell of mortal imagination, a place of simple torture and punishment. This was Hell as it truly existed, a cosmic factory processing the raw materials of spiritual energy.
Movement drew his attention. Figures approached from the direction of the structures. Unlike the newly arrived spirits, these beings had fully formed bodies, detailed and solid. They were demons, but not the horned and tailed caricatures of mortal mythology. They were beautiful in an alien way, their forms perfect expressions of Hell's aesthetic—the beauty of inevitability, of endings.
They moved among the gathered spirits, examining each briefly before directing them toward different structures. A sorting process of some kind, allocating new arrivals to their proper places within Hell's vast machinery.
When they reached Xeos, they paused. Their eyes—gemlike orbs of swirling fire—widened slightly. They spoke among themselves in a language that was not speech but rather the exchange of pure conceptual meaning.
Then one separated from the group, approaching Xeos directly. It extended a hand—a graceful appendage with too many joints, too many fingers—and touched his forehead. Information flowed from the demon to Xeos, direct and unfiltered. Knowledge of his new existence. Understanding of what was to come.
He was bound for the deepest layers of Hell, the foundries where raw spiritual energy was processed and refined. There, his unusual mixture of divine and anti-divine energy would be separated, each component channeled into different aspects of Hell's work. The process would consume him slowly, drawing out his power over eons as his spirit was gradually absorbed into Hell itself.
This was the fate of powerful souls who came to Hell—to serve as fuel for the great god's endlessly churning machinery.
The demon withdrew its hand, gesturing for Xeos to follow. It led him away from the gathering of new souls, toward one of the towering spires. Other demons joined them, forming an escort that surrounded him on all sides. They did not restrain him physically, but their presence formed a cage of spiritual pressure from which there was no escape.
As they walked, the landscape of Hell revealed itself more fully. What had appeared to be an obsidian plain was in fact a vast, shallow sea of liquid darkness, its surface reflective and still. The structures rose directly from this sea, their foundations extending deep below the surface. Occasionally, ripples would spread outward from the base of a structure, disturbing the perfect reflection.
They reached the entrance to the spire, a towering archway inscribed with symbols that shifted and changed even as Xeos observed them. The symbols were not written in any language he recognized, yet he understood their meaning: "Refinement Through Dissolution."
Beyond the archway lay a spiraling rampway that descended into the depths of the structure. Down they went, level after level, the air growing hotter and more charged with energy. Other beings passed them on the ramp—demons of various ranks, souls in various states of processing, entities that defied categorization. All moved with purpose, with the certain knowledge of their place within Hell's great machinery.
At last they reached their destination: a vast chamber filled with mechanisms that pulsed with power. Souls were chained to these mechanisms, their bodies stretched and distorted as energy flowed from them into the machines. They did not scream or struggle; they had been here long enough to accept their role, to surrender to the inevitability that Hell represented.
The demon escort brought Xeos to an empty station. Chains of dark fire manifested from the mechanism, reaching for him. They wrapped around his wrists and ankles, his waist and neck, binding him securely to the machine. As they tightened, he felt the first tug of energy being drawn from his spirit, a sensation both painful and strangely fulfilling.
This was his fate now. To be fuel for Hell's endless work. To be slowly consumed, his power used to maintain the cosmic balance between the three great gods. To exist in this state until nothing remained of him but the memory of having once been.
Xeos opened his eyes at hell in chains, getting ready to work with all other trapped souls.