Hello.
A few days ago I put up a thread with a suggestion for how the lead-up to the ACW2 can be altered to be more realistic, with only some slight lore changes. Though I proposed mechanics changes and I'm not a programmer, I thought I could take it as a personal project to write more. The original thread received about 75% upvotes, so I thought there might be at least a little interest. I am very much hopeful to hear feedback, but thank you to anyone who just clicked this link to read in curiosity.
The original thread was here, but it's a serious 'rough draft'. https://old.reddit.com/Kaiserreich/comments/1cecaka/a_possible_new_direction_for_an_acw_that_still/
This is a long document, so I've broken it up into imgur links for those who don't want to sit and read the entire mini-essay all at once as a big blob of text.

1. Premise https://i.imgur.com/118BhzQ.png
   
2. Backstory https://i.imgur.com/uaFnBc5.png
   
3. Republican Party https://i.imgur.com/GS9TW98.png
   
4. John "Jack" Reed, republican? C'mon. https://i.imgur.com/hqGzxyN.png
   
5. Democratic Party https://i.imgur.com/S1Ku5iJ.png
   
6. Scandal! https://i.imgur.com/FVNCG58.png
   
7. Republican choices for solutions to the scandal. https://i.imgur.com/eKv3bsS.png
   
8. Republican results for solutions to the scandal. https://i.imgur.com/tIYAnL7.png
   
9. Summation, mechanics, and the fail-state. https://i.imgur.com/rFTVYVt.png
   
10. What is the fail-state, in lore and mechanics? https://i.imgur.com/0Lgtzmp.png
    

Premise: The German rework has raised KR expectations to new high standards. Compared, the leadup to the ACW2 looks primitive. This is an attempt at suggesting how this could be altered. It would not suggest fancy mechanics, new 'tick-down' timers, a few decisions, and new focus trees.
Consideration: There are many criticisms that the political landscape of America in krTL just makes no sense. Such is that left-wing ideologies would permeate so far into public consciousness, and that the federal government would be split into a four party system. I therefore approached this suggestion with two goals: 1. Address the criticisms. America retains its two party system. There is no wide-spread support for outright syndicalism, just for a need for more progressivism that will be used by individual syndicalists for their own ends. Either by implanting spies, sympathizers, or 'useful idiots' who naively believe syndicalism can be 'worked with.' Huey Long also focuses on taking over the Democrat party, not forming his own party. 2. Keep the "usual players". Do not touch, expel or introduce anyone strange. The same general people are around. That means the main choices are Olson, Landon, Garner, Long, and Reed. MacArthur similarly is there, but his appearance needs to be earned and his decision to return to a civilian administration or become dictator is determined by paths chosen. None of these are changed, despite any lore changes. Quentin Roosevelt is also around, as he's been introduced to Kaiserreich with some popularity. However, Quentin's personality is more in line with his RL personality that we know of. That is, he was good-natured but brash and impulsive. Not a calming figure.
Backstory: 1936 America, life continues on, the great depression is still a thing. America has been hit by a string of underwhelming presidents who either lack vision, guts, or support to take any sort of decisive action. The 1936 election is coming, and no one expects anything to change. The working class has become more progressive, but outright support for Syndicalism remains restricted to extreme fringes. Not one federal politician openly calls himself a syndicalist. There is no "new deal" beyond a pipe dream of progressive republicans in government.
America is controlled by two parties. The Republicans and Democrats. The republicans control the Senate and Presidency. The democrats control the House by a wide margin.

1. The Republican Party is being increasingly entry-level co-opted by secret syndicalists, syndicalist-sympathizers, and 'useful idiots' who detest syndicalism but approve of civil rights. Genuine progressives are also gaining more popularity among the common voters as economic woes have continued in the country under republican administrations. The old establishment of pro-business leaders still have control of the party, but many have retired. Some have even become democrats, or at least endorsed the democratic party, in apprehension of the rising progressive influence in the party.

Republicans still control the senate, mostly because of long six-year terms, and that independents choose to caucus with them. Herbert Hoover is also President, owing to victories against an unpopular Al Smith in both the 1928, and the 1932 presidential elections.
Republican control of the senate is slim and It requires appealing to senators who have more progressive leanings and some politicians who are serving as Independents. Herbert Hoover is not well liked by the population, but as a second term lame-duck president, not many in the party care anymore about his public appeal. He is a stable figure for the Republicans, because he is a firm anti-progressive and the old power structure is still tenaciously trying to hold onto power.
Noteworthy republicans in the party: President Herbert Hoover, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt Jr, Senate Majority Leader James E. Watson, Governor Alf Landon, Governor Quentin Roosevelt, Frank P. Walsh, Nathan Witt, Henry A. Wallace
Old-Guard republicans leader: Herbert Hoover.
Independent, but is considered the progressives leader: Floyd Olson
Republican progressive who is the syndicalists' 'useful idiot': Henry A. Wallace.
Independent, but votes with republicans, has syndicalist leanings: Norman Thomas
Independent, but votes with republicans, secret syndicalist: John "Jack" Reed
Noteworthy persons who have left the republicans and become democrats: Charles Curtis, Reed Smoot
Following the tradition of the VP being nominated for the next presidency, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt Jr. is the presumptive nominee, and no challenger to his nomination has emerged as all sides approved the candidacy. The republican party has, despite its differences, rallied around the idea that to have any chance of winning the presidency and maintaining the senate, they absolutely must be united. No serious primary challenger emerged.
Question: How is John "Jack" Reed voting with the Republicans? C'mon. Answer: This is partially a conceit. I don't want to expel him. You have to have John "Jack" Reed as face of the CSA. You just have to. But the main idea is that after returning from Russia, Reed claims he simply went there as "a journalist," and that he has since repudiated any endorsement he could have made about Leninism, Bolshevism, and that Syndicalism should be dealt with on a 'if you want the best strategy against Syndicalism, ignore them." Republicans don't like him being associated with the party, but they need him for two reasons. One, he's popular among the working class. Two, his vote also influences progressives like Wallace, Thomas, and even Olson at times.

1. The Democrat party is facing a resurgence in popularity. The years of Hoover and the increasing paranoia about the Republican party are gathering voters weary of syndicalist influence in the Republicans, and old Republicans who defected. And those who didn't outright change their party are now endorsing them after retiring. They outright won the House of Representatives in 1934, and are heavily favored to win the presidency. After some contention for leadership, they are united behind John Nance Garner, an old party boss known for his ability to steer political rules to his favor and has an established political machine in the South, which is a region they desperately need to win. They coalesce around him for a very good reason.

Huey Long.
"America First" Democrat, Huey Long, has his own political machine in Louisiana, and it has spread from its base to other parts of the country. John Nance Garner has the popularity of the old power structure bosses, but that is slowly being subverted by Long's populist rhetoric. Huey Long has proposed a bill that he promises will save the entire nation: Share the Wealth. Democrats decry it as 'flimflam', 'snake oil' and 'syndicalism in all but name,' but the promise of economic equality is a powerful one. Garner furthermore has no catchy-slogan economic cure-all legislation up his sleeve. Garner's campaign is not based on policy he is ready to implement. Nor does he even offer any vision for a new direction. He is campaigning on "I'm not a republican." Huey Long smells blood, and he's impatient. He knows this election is the best chance for the democrats to defeat the republicans, but if Garner wins as the candidate, Long's dreams of the White House evaporate forever. The main speed-bump: the Democrats absolutely refuse to let him be the candidate, and the fiscal conservative economic politicians from the republicans who have defected to the democrats have done everything they can to subvert Huey Long's efforts. When the dust settles, Garner is set firmly to be the nominee, with the Vice Presidential candidacy going to Newton D. Baker, a Ohioan who they hope can deliver them support in the north. The defeat is crushing for Huey Long, but he still has his political machine, staunch loyalists, populist base, and a plan up his sleeve.
In this environment it erupts:
Scandal!
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. is revealed to have had his hand in numerous government corruption cases that stretch back for more than a decade. In truth, this information had been known and held by Syndicalist spies for over a decade and left to fester. It is only to be released now in the last hour when Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was already accepted as the nominee. The republican party is in complete disarray. The evidence is too damning. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. tries to argue he should be the nominee anyway, but that illusion is short lived. The party leaders of the republicans are fractured enough that they now no longer can prevent criticism of their nominee and he is forced to retire. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.'s one universal appealing point is that he was his father's son, and now that family name is tarnished.
Meanwhile, Quentin Roosevelt, ever the impulsive and brash man he is, takes a seemingly ordinary public event he was supposed to merely attend as a guest speaker and turns it into a barn-stormer of a speech in which he openly denounces his brother, confesses the pain he's caused to the family, and emotionally vents about the personal shame he feels. The speech is spontaneous and very genuine. It shocks the audience to such an extent it's picked up as national news. There were reporters recording the speech which only increases the mystique as it ends up broadcast by radio as well. This infuriates Theodore Roosevelt Jr., and he accepts a rebuttal radio interview as a chance to reply. This backfires. The situation is turned on him as the reporter uses it as a chance to publicly press him about the scandals he's involved in, causing Theodore Roosevelt Jr. to clam up for fear of saying something incriminating. The public eats up the drama, and public opinion firmly swerves in the direction of Quentin as "the good Roosevelt".
Problem: The democrats need to decide on a new nominee. And they need to do it now. Furthermore, they must be united. The longer the process drags on, the more their prospects are doomed. They were already bad to start with, but the scandal is almost going to guarantee not just that they will lose the presidency, but that the progressives will overtake the Republicans and finally drive the old guard out. Each faction draws up three plans:

1. Four More Years: Run Herbert Hoover for an unprecedented third term. They can't nominate another old-guard Republican: after the defections, all the best replacements are senators, and they simply can't lose any of the senate republicans who are the old-guard for fear of losing their majority and/or ceding more power to the progressives. Quentin Roosevelt is in the public eye, but he's similarly undesirable because they don't trust his impulsivity. Vice Presidency is offered to Nicholas Longworth, a notable house representative with ties to John Nance Garner who they hope will lure republicans who defected to the democrats back to their side. This plan draws criticism from nearly all sides, even some of the old-guard, for violating the 'two term limit' tradition, but the only other option is trying to nominate a defected republican, and that's impossible. John "Jack" Reed denounces the plan.
   
2. The Grand Bargain: Run unassuming Republican Governor Alf Landon for president. Alf Landon fits a sweet-spot as a candidate. He's a state governor, has the background of being a supporter of President Roosevelt's progressive parties, yet holds a pedigree as a "self made oil man" who "earned" his fortune. In a show of political savvy, Alf Landon approaches Norman Thomas for the candidacy of Vice President. Norman Thomas is known as a progressive 'of character', who is even known to vote against John "Jack" Reed. Landon proposes a campaign with a catchy slogan of: "honesty, integrity, liberty, Landon," to contrast with the scandal caused by Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Landon's distance from Washington makes this argument more credible. The old guard is skeptical, especially because Norman Thomas has the taint of 'progressive' but they decide "kicking him upstairs" to Vice President with a president who is robust and healthy is probably a good idea. John "Jack" Reed privately fumes over this choice, but he can't criticize it without looking like a hypocrite, so John "Jack" Reed simply lets the proposal stand with a vague "good idea, if it works" comment.
   
3. Deal with the Devil: Senator Floyd Olson proposes a plan that shocks nearly everyone in the party: reaching out to the democrats and running on an unprecedented "Unity Party." In a show of political long-sightedness that could reach the level of clairvoyance, Olson says there is an existential threat to American democracy that exists, right now, and it is not any syndicalist takeover. It's the movement of Huey Long. He announces that he's worked the math, and there won't be a chance that the Republican party can win the presidential election over the democrats. However, there is a chance that Huey Long can do serious damage to democracy in America in itself. He therefore proposes that the Democrats officially be offered the chance to run John Nance Garner as Vice President, with Olson himself as president. When the question of why Garner would ever agree to this comes up, Olson says he is willing to pass legislation that will satisfy both parties. All factions are absolutely shocked, but are desperate enough that serious consideration is made of this plan. The old-guard even theorizes this plan could bring previous defectors back into the republican fold. John "Jack" Reed officially offers his support, with the claim that he has seen 'evils of syndicalism' in Long's policies, and that Olson makes a compelling argument. Privately, he's hoping his official support will reflexively make the old-guard suspicious and reject the plan.
   

Result for each choice:
Four More Years: The old-guard attempts to outright bully its way into its proposition, but this backfires. At least half of the old-guard reveals the writing on the wall: Herbert Hoover is unpopular and will never win. And that should mean something. If the old-guard runs Hoover as a nominee, all political credibility of the republican party as the party of steady fiscal conservatism will disappear.
However, this does inspire the old-guard to make a new plan. If they are to run Hoover and he loses, discrediting them forever, what happens if they run a progressive and he loses? The progressives will be discredited instead. The progressive wing, already a small minority of moderates and independents, will be utterly devastated and politically never recover. They therefore callously suggest running the progressives' ringleader as President: John "Jack" Reed. It will mean effectively surrendering the Presidency for four years, but it'll be worth it in the long run.
The old-guard comes out announcing they will support a candidate John "Jack" Reed. The progressives are absolutely shocked. Reed is savvy enough to know this is a political trap, but it could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Reed accepts on the condition Quentin Roosevelt be named his Vice President. The stated reason is that he still has his father's good name and Reed wants to run a campaign of 'popular support'. Privately, Reed plans to use Quentin as a possible scapegoat for his loss, knowing Quentin's tendency for acting impulsively and relative political naivete. Quentin for his part plays the role perfectly by accepting with no reservations, taking Reed's word that he is simply a 'progressive' now and not a Syndicalist.
The Grand Bargain: Realizing this is the best 'middle ground' that they possibly have, and that both individual politicians know each other and share good chemistry, the republican party universally accepts the nomination of Alf Landon with Norman Thomas as Vice President. John "Jack" Reed finally gives his support, ensuring that the party looks absolutely united in both old-guard and progressive.
Privately Reed is cursing his luck, but optimistic about maintaining a 'pressure' role as he is still the most well regarded progressive among unions and can gain credit in 'driving them to victory,' hopefully marginalizing the old-guard as they continue to retire or die out. If this plan is chosen, and the republicans win, Reed will not lead the CSA during the civil war. He will, however, be a minister who cannot be dismissed the entire game.
Deal with the Devil: The old guard decides to risk it and privately contacts John Nance Garner on their own. Garner is at first aghast, then insulted, but after a few days calls back and says he'll take the deal. His stated reason is that he has seen Huey Long's political machine and how infectious his populist rhetoric is and believes him to be a dangerous threat. This is not the real reason for accepting the offer. He is, cynically and callously, counting on the presidential office to take its toll on Olson's ill health and give Garner the presidency he desires after he inevitably succumbs. At any rate, the "deal with the devil" is signed. John "Jack" Reed curses that he's played himself.
However, this allows Huey Long to take over the Democrat party officially. He names himself Presidential nominee, and close friend Seymour Weiss as Vice Presidential nominee. Weiss has little qualifications beyond being Long's trusted puppet. He has only been nominated because Long's childhood friend Oscar K. Allen tragically died of a brain hemorrhage in early 1936.
Summation:

1. At the beginning of the game, the player will be prompted to play as either the Republicans or the Democrats. This unlocks unique focus trees and decisions leading up to 1936's election. It's possible to choose to play as one side and then intentionally lose to the AI side, but it's not recommended as the positive changes done in the focus tree and through decisions will all be undone. The player therefore has incentive to play as the side they want to win the election. Exception: If the player wishes to play the Huey Long secret path, they must start as the republicans and go with Olson, then intentionally lose to Long. The main incentive of playing the Huey Long secret path is creating a very strong AUS at the civil war's start, which will have great advantages over the other factions.
   
2. How to actually win the election mini-game: Each side will have focuses and various decisions that require PP that will do one of two things: a. Campaign in a specific region. b. Lower opponent's influence in a specific region.
   

There will be specific values for region control The party that has over 50% in that region when the mini-game is over wins that region. Each region has a value that contributes to electoral college votes. 266 to win.

1. Huey Long's influence: During the mini-game for the election, there will also be a bar for "Huey Long's influence." This will continually rise during the game. The value at the end will remove electoral college votes from the Democrat party. However, if Huey Long influence reaches 100%, a fail-state will occur. (This fail-state is a bad modifier for both the republicans and democrats, and will continue to haunt the USA for most of the game. It's not bad for a CSA player, though, so a player may want to let it happen.) Both Republicans and Democrats can spend PP on decisions (or take focuses) to lower Huey Long's influence. However, since it benefits the republicans to have Huey Long hurt the democrats' chances, do they really want to? Maybe to prevent the fail state! Who knows. If Huey Long influence reaches zero, Huey Long is officially expelled from the Democrat party. Not only that, but the rest of the mini-game becomes irrelevant. Garner will win the election no matter what. Furthermore, the AUS will not spawn. So, this result should be achievable, but rely on putting all energy on Long, which means wasting PP and doing focuses only related to hurting Long. A human will be able to achieve it. The AI will not, unless specifically set in the starting menu.

Please note that a republican player who is going the Olson route does not have a "Huey Long influence" bar. Olson only needs to campaign. He has a relatively easy win, but the human can intentionally fail the minigame. He's the candidate for if the human can't get the hang of avoiding the fail-state.
What is the fail-state, in terms of lore and mechanics?:
Huey Long's plan is simple: bully electors to vote for him instead of Garner. If he reaches 100% on the bar, Huey Long will try to claim he is the real Democrat nominee, and demand all democrat electors vote for him. In itself, this would do nothing except be more hot air from Long. However, since Long's influence is so big in extent, this will cause mass chaos as voters won't know if voting democrat means they're voting for Garner or Long. The campaign mini-game officially loses all meaning. Neither side will get a majority of electoral college votes and the 12th amendment will kick in. The player can then choose if the republican candidate or Garner won, but the USA receives a modifier that gives them a very high stability hit.
Constitutional Crisis: "Americans believed their constitution guarantees "government by the people". Huey Long has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that it has loopholes that can subvert that expectation, and faith in it as a symbol of liberty is broken. The mystique of the wisdom of the "Founding Fathers" in creating the document that represents our nation has been permanently tarnished."
"But the 12th amendment was added later in 1804? Why would they think that when it's not in the original text? Fair enough, but this describes public perception. The "zeitgeist" in America is now that their vote doesn't matter. "Constitutional crisis means something else, it means a situation when there's a conflict in government functions that the constitution can't resolve." Yes, I'm aware, I just thought it was a nice pun.
Thank you for reading. If there is support for this, I am willing to write more. Refine. Redraft. However, if not, I'll just... stop.

Age:23F background asian approx height 160cm weight 50kg, no medications , rarely smokes, good general health
Its been like 10 years since ive gotten this scar, used to have a tiny skin tag/mole and i was young so i kept picking on it and well- it left a scar. Years of trying out scar gels and silicone sheets and nothing seemed to work, i remember trying to use a microneedle roller , but i wonder if it makes hypertrophic scars worse? Because technically it stimulates the skin to produce more collagen ( so in this case wouldn’t it become more raised?) or should i microneedle in combination with using a silicone sheet to flatten it? I really don’t want to make it worse at this point as i feel like doing so many things to it really hasn’t made it better over the years either.
I haven’t been to a proper skin doctor at a hospital as the costs seem super high from local online forums for similar types of scars? I’ve asked a couple of skin aesthetics centers who do like HIFU / co2 laser and they did not seem very optimistic about flattening my scar. One even said because its on a nerve it could grow back bigger if i do those treatments. Would anyone be so kind to give me advice on this? Its been bothering me for half my life , im only in my early 20s. If it was anywhere else I wouldn’t have cared as much but its in the middle of my forehead and shows up whenever i take a picture, even though its not a huge scar.
So basically im trying to figure out what the best solution is to flattening this in any way: microneedling combined with silicon sheets? Just silicon sheets? Steroid injection? Something else? 😿

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
   
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
   
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
   
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
   

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still says with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

1. Make a bonding activity out of it. Prepare food together for a picnic in a nice park or outdoor area. Just be sure and bring your Tazer or other means of self defense. Wouldn’t want quality time interrupted. 2. Visit a bakery 3. Pick an event you both like 4. Go shopping for new clothes 5. Go to one of those fun park places with mini golf and go karts 6. Visit some historic buildings or local attractions in your area. 7. Spend time at one of your places of dwelling and learn more about each other 8. Go to a nearby ice cream shop and make a date out of it right then 9. Go to a Bookstore or your local Barnes and Noble 

1. That “best friend” would use up valuable time and resources you should spend on your Yandere lady 2. That “best friend” may try to steal away a love interest (over the years I heard about this happening to people where the best friend would steal someones woman or man.) 3. The likelihood of a “best friend” betraying you is rather high. 4. They’re a distraction 5. They would make the Yandere jealous 6. The Yandere would likely tell you to stop talking to them. 

Hey shedditors,
I had this crazy idea for an improvement to our backyard space that I was certain would not be up to code, not allowed for one reason or another, or would be far too expensive to be a viable option. Just for kicks I started taking a look at the building codes for Salem, OR and confirmed that our home is large enough for a large detached structure on the property of the size that I imagined. The more I looked into reasons why it would not work, the more support I found for why it actually could work… and in some cases even better than I’d imagined!
We already have a wonderful home with a beautiful view from the font, but that unfortunately comes with a lack of privacy, street lights, and other aspects that keep sending me to the backyard. Our backyard is fantastic during certain times of year and is unbearable during other times. I have been looking for a solution and realized that this might be an option for us to consider.
The basic idea is to build a deck raised high enough to see the awesome view from the front and sturdy enough to hold a large hot tub with space enough for a family of 12 to hang out at a table and hammocks comfortably. We would then want a shed of some kind to shelter the space from the elements, while still being able to be opened up on nice days. I had other lofty ideas that involved feeding the fire heated hot tub with captured and distilled rainwater, but everything really depends on this idea.
So, my wife suggested that I put this crazy idea in front of the expert eyes of the shedditors before we ask a paid professional to take a look at something that may not even be possible!😊
I really haven’t done much on reddit (okay boomer), but I think it goes something like…
&tdlr: Can I build a shed on an ~ 15’ x 35’ raised deck in my backyard in West Salem and if so, at what ballpark cost (without relying on DYI skills)?
Yard Layout and Dimensions:

• Back patio is poured concrete with the house forming a U-shape facing the rest of the backyard. This area is ~ 24’ wall to wall and 30’ to the back half of the yard
• The back half of the yard is made up of three tiers with a total area of ~ 67’ fence to fence and 36.5’ patio to back fence:
  • Bottom tier has a permanent 4’ concrete block wall on either side of a set of 7 concrete steps up to the Top tier
  • Middle tier has a flower bed on the right side going back ~ 6’ deep before a removable 3’ wall. This wall could also be continued around to the left to level out the Top tier
  • Top tier has a large flat space on the right side of the yard that tapers down and to the left

The Deck:

• ~ 15’ – 20’ from patio to back fence by ~ 30’ – 40’ from fence to fence, depending upon cost, position requirements, etc.
• ~ 5’ – 8’ above ground to provide the desired view
• Reinforced to hold a large hot tub and ~ 12 family members
• Durable with a long lifespan
• Preferably heat resistant

The Shed:

• The walls are sturdy and insulated enough to minimize cold, creaking, wind, and neighbor noise
• The front top and top front (or all) walls are easily removable or propped open windows, but sturdy against wind
• The roof is similarly insulated, but living roof might make sense. I want light to come in, but not be deafened by weather when everything is closed
• The roof is pitched front to back, which allows some flexibility in overall height
• Ground to roof (1/2 of pitch) must be below 15’

The Plumbing (wish list idea):

• capturing the rainwater in large containers
• vaporizing it while using the BBQ
• condensing and capturing the distilled water in a larger container uphill
• using that water to fill the hot tub
• heating the hot tub via a wood stove on or near the deck
• draining the chemical free hot tub to the street as needed

The Electrical:

• Initial thought was to feed a line with the rain gutters that would be needed to capture the rainwater to give the shed power, but I heard that the electrical line must be buried
• Second thought if it must be buried is; Can it be buried up to the 4’ concrete wall, go up a receptacle up and over the wall, then go underground again and follow near the drainage line that would need to be dug?

So what do you think? Crazy idea that is a waste of time? Or maybe worth a closer look?
Thanks!

Re:Zero - Starting Life in Another World

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With Re:Zero's Season 3 incoming (Oct/24), this might be the perfect time for us to plan a massive group rewatch for this masterpiece of a serie! Of course, this is also the perfect opportunity for you, that have been postponing this serie for too long, to finally start it!! This is your chance!
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• Hey, OP, what is Re:Zero about?

In short and without spoilers, Re:Zero is a story that follows a young boy called THE GOAT Natsuki Subaru after he gets transported to another world. In this new world, he will face countless difficulties/obstancles, but also met amazing, lovable and memorable people. The serie is filled with mystery, drama and brutality. Re:Zero is all about its characters and their continuous growth.
For more information, please check the following links: MAL AniList Crunchyroll
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• How big is Re:Zero?

The serie is composed by 2 Seasons and 2 OVA's. In total, there are about 50 episodes + 2 Movie Lenght OVA's.
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• Is the story over?

No, as I said previously, Season 3 is coming this October. The story is based of a Light Novel, which is currently on Volume 37 and going. The anime covers up to Volume 15. The story isn't even close to finishing, there is still a lot to come.
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• What makes Re:Zero special?

To list a few:

1. Characters, they are NO NPCs, each and every character has its own life, goals and personality.
2. Voice Acting, Re:Zero VA cast is amazing. Yuusuke Kobayashi has won awards for his role as Natsuki Subaru. We also have Takehito Koyasu as DIO Roswaal, Rie Takahashi as Emilia, Inori Minase as Rem and Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Betelgeuse, in a performance that made our jaws drop in astonishment.
3. Soundtrack, Re:Zero's OST is so memorable that many people that have never watched the show will be able to recognize THIS, and after you watch this serie for the first time, I can assure, you will never forget it. Jokes aside, the series is filled with EPIC tracks. It is, in my opinion, one of the most consistently good OSTs in all of anime.
4. Unpredictability, good luck trying to guess what is gonna happen next.
5. Rewatch Value, due to the nature of the show and how it is constructed, each time you rewatch you will be able to notice many details here and there that will completely recontextualize certain scenes, foreshadow future events or just leave you with a smile on your face for being able to notice it. On my 10th rewatch I'm still noticing new details.
6. Lore / World / Mystery, the world of ReZero and its story is very dense and mysterious. Slowly, in each episode you will learn more about it. There is still a lot to come, the Author always leave us wanting for more.

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• Version to Watch (Normal or Directors Cut):

Season 1 of Re:Zero has 2 versions:

1. The normal one, with 25 episodes
2. The Directors Cut, with 13 episodes.

The Directors Cut is basically the normal version but 2 episodes at a time. They are "glued" in together in a 50min episode, instead of 2 episodes with 25 min each. I, personally, much prefer the normal version, with 25 episodes. Because the endings hit harder when they are endings, instead of just another scene in the middle of the episode.
That being said, Crunchyroll has removed the 25-Episode normal Season from their catalog, and only the Directors Cut version remains. Therefore, to watch it legally, it has to be the DC Version.
We could "simulate" the 25 episode by doing half episodes on the Directors Cut, but I think this would overly complicate things for First Timers. So, lets just stick to the Directors Cut for season 1, as it is simpler.
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• OVA placement:

There is also a huge debate on whether to watch Memory Snow and Frozen Bonds, in the middle of Season 1, or after it.
Well, I'm placing Memory Snow after Episode 6 of the Directors Cut.
Why? For 2 reasons:
1) It is when it happens in the story, Chronologicaly. It is a direct continuation from the events of Episode 6 and watching it after Season 1 (which many people suggest) can be confusing for First Timers. Watching it after Episode 6, on the contrary, feels natural.
2) It is placed after the Directors Cut Episode 6 in Crunchyroll, so the viewer doesn't need to go out of its way to search for it, nor skip it and then come back, its simple and easy.
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• Re:Zero BREAKTIME:

There is a series called Re:Zero Breaktime, which is a serie of 2-3 min episodes with Chibi animation that cover Canon events (except for the PETIT, which is filler) that didn't make it to the main episode.
Each Chibi episode is related to the same numbered Episode of the main series. For an example, Breaktime Episode 7 is related to Re:Zero Episode 7 (or Episode 4 of the Directors Cut).
In our Rewatch, I'll add the Breaktime Episodes to the discussion and to the table of Episodes, to guide the viewers.
The Breaktime Episodes should be watched after the Main Episode.
Re:Zero Breaktime, Season 1 can be watched on Crunchyroll
Unfortunately, Season 2 is not available on Crunchyroll, so I cannot link a page for you to legally watch it, you will have to find it on your own.
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• Watch Order:

As explained above, I will stick to what I believe being the best experience for the viewer. I've also considered the Directors Cut version, because, at the moment of this post, its the only one available at Crunchyroll.
That being said, here is my proposal:
Season 1:

Episode Number	Title	Breaktime Episode	Date
1	DC E1	Breaktime Ep 01	TBD
2	DC E2	Breaktime Ep 02 + 03	TBD
3	DC E3	Breaktime Ep 04 + 05	TBD
4	DC E4	Breaktime Ep 06 + 07	TBD
5	DC E5	Breaktime Ep 08 + 09	TBD
6	DC E6	Breaktime Ep 10 + 11	TBD
OVA	Memory Snow		TBD
7	DC E7	PETIT Ep 01 + 02	TBD
8	DC E8	PETIT Ep 03 + 04	TBD
9	DC E9	PETIT Ep 05 + 06	TBD
10	DC E10	PETIT Ep 07 + 08	TBD
11	DC E11	PETIT Ep 09 + 10	TBD
12	DC E12	PETIT Ep 11 + 12	TBD
13	DC E13	PETIT Ep 13 + 14	TBD
OVA	The Frozen Bond		TBD

Season 2:

Episode Number	Title	Breaktime Episode	Date
1	S2E1	Breaktime S2E01	TBD
2	S2E2	Breaktime S2E02	TBD
3	S2E3	Breaktime S2E03	TBD
4	S2E4	Breaktime S2E04	TBD
5	S2E5	Breaktime S2E05	TBD
6	S2E6	Breaktime S2E06	TBD
7	S2E7	Breaktime S2E07	TBD
8	S2E8	Breaktime S2E08	TBD
9	S2E9	Breaktime S2E09	TBD
10	S2E10	Breaktime S2E10	TBD
11	S2E11	Breaktime S2E11	TBD
12	S2E12	Breaktime S2E12	TBD
13	S2E13	Breaktime S2E13	TBD
14	S2E14	Breaktime S2E14	TBD
15	S2E15	Breaktime S2E15	TBD
16	S2E16	Breaktime S2E16	TBD
17	S2E17	Breaktime S2E17	TBD
18	S2E18	Breaktime S2E18	TBD
19	S2E19	Breaktime S2E19	TBD
20	S2E20	Breaktime S2E20	TBD
21	S2E21	Breaktime S2E21	TBD
22	S2E22	Breaktime S2E22	TBD
23	S2E23	Breaktime S2E23	TBD
24	S2E24	Breaktime S2E24	TBD
25	S2E25	Breaktime S2E25	TBD

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• Spoiler Rules:

Rewatch threads work just as a normal episode thread. What does this mean? It means that any spoiler and hint toward future events will be absolutely forbidden. Every information that isn't in the anime should be spoiler tagged.
Explanations utilizing LN info should be spoiler tagged.
Talk about cut content should be spoiler tagged.
That being said, small details that are in the anime, but people didn't seem to remember as much, won't need to be spoiler tagged, since it is animated and there for everyone to see.
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• Dates:

My proposal is to have an episode every other day, so people have an extra day to catch up and also because ReZero is very dense with information, the discussion can benefit from an extra day to make theories.
If we start with the 1st episode on June 15th, we will have the last thread on September 1st, only a month before Season 3 airs. Sounds like a good timeframe.
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Please, voice your opinions, let us know that there is interest in this rewatch, so we can make it happen!
Also, leave suggestions and lets keep this discussion SPOILER FREE.
Have a good evening!!

Like the title, after that the screen got glitches, half and then the whole screen. I got freaked out, restarted the phone and it… back to normal. I tried to…drop it with case and short height, but nothing abnormal. So my question is what should I do? Forget about it or bring it to trade-in? If I keep using it, does the warranty cover? How does it cost if fixing it, like the cable problem? Everything on the outside, screen and back glass, is perfectly fine. Thank you guys.

Looking for some advice about changing careers later in life,
I'm in my 30s, currently working full time but looking to change careers specifically to something Electrically or mechanically orientated - not for FIFO, just for genuine interest (mechanical background and a cert IV in programming and software)
can't see myself retiring for another 3 and a half decades yet the general opinion from people I've asked with trades is that i'm just too old.
I'm becoming somewhat disillusioned by the sheer numbers game of applications, cover letters I've sent so far in the last few months (about 46 individual roles applied so far, for zero responses, yes my Cover Letter is catered to each role specifically)
Most entry level apprenticeship roles do ask the bare minimum, AKA a license, reliable transport, and a 'can do' attitude, pass a drug test, and have a clean police record.
but when this is the case, am I immediately being placed at the bottom of the application list because I can't be paid 10 dollars an hour as an adult?
At the moment I'm yet to be able to make it so far as an interview and the only thing that would potentially work in my favor that I can think of is completing an unpaid CERT II at Tafe in a pre-apprenticeship, which would mean I'd have to quit my job and complete unpaid which isn't viable financially in my circumstance.
I have a fair amount of work history (some 15 odd years across fairly diverse roles), and a few tickets, but it seems like actually landing an interview is almost out of reach for me.
How did those of you that applied as mature aged applicants end up in your place of work?
Any sound advice you can pass on?

I’m feeling good about my progress, by the 4th week, I weighed in at 286.5lbs. That brings me down to a total 13.5 pounds lost!
Ryan, M, 26, SW:300 CW:286 GW:175
Last week I took a trip to Vegas for Sick New World and to see my Aunt and Uncle. I was there a total of about 4 days. I walked A TON. So much to the point that I could feel the tension overnight in my feet and legs. I had to take alot of rests at the festival but thats okay because I still got alot of exercise.
During the trip trying to eat good was a little hard, but doable. I made sure to stay away from fried foods, always tried to pick healthier options, for example, a grilled chicken sandwich over a cheese burger. A salad over pasta etc. it wasnt hard because of food noise or hunger, it was hard because of the options surrounding me and my partner at the resort we stayed at, and more than half the other restaurants on the strip. Hell every other block on the strip there was a McDonalds. My God.
The other thing that made it a little difficult was drinking. I didnt have any cravings per usual (Thank you Zep) but because its Vegas and we were on vacay I drank anyways. I drank the first night, only had like 2 drinks. I stopped after I started getting nauseous. Then at the festival (1.5 days later) I had like 5 light cocktails. It was the 5th day after the shot so I actually felt fine, but very guilty. Then the last night I had a few IPAs like an idiot the night before we left for home and I did vomit the day after. Never again. I’m not going anywhere high energy or high leisure for a while.
Now that I’m back at home I can continue to keep on track. I still lost 1 pound even after all that so I’m still happy about it. This week will be much better in terms of weight loss and dieting.
Oh! I also picked up my second box of 2.5mg today with zero issues, seems like my area’s back order issues are slowly going away. Also I know, “my second box of 2.5mg?” Thats just how my Doctor had it done, he wants to see how I do on it for a longer time span than 30 days before titrating me up to 5mg. I have a feeling though that after next weeks appt he will give me the prescription for 5mg. I’ll just keep the 2.5mg for maintenance in case theres any issues finding the 5mg boxes.
I hope y’all are seeing results! Wish everyone luck!

I asked for recommendations here a few days ago since I was stuck between 42" C3 or PG32UCM and many people suggested that I C3 would be a better fit for my use case so I picked up one on a hefty discount (for ~720€, almost half the price of any 32" oled monitor) and I've been using it for a week now.
I loved the image quality ofc, but although I have a deep desk, I couldn't really enjoy 42" but then I learned about custom resolutions and started playing around with UW and 3200x1800 resolutions and then it became just perfect!
So my question now is that is it safe to use these custom resolutions? And if yes, then is there a catch or did I basically buy a perfect OLED display for half the price! The only complain I have is about HDR but I think that's just a matter of PC games and it won't be any different on qd-oleds neither.
P.s: I was really worried about text sharpness and ABL and "C3 being a TV is not so convinient" but I have absolutely zero issues with any of them! I actually like the versatility of it a lot, as I can basically replicate a 27" 1440p monitor to play some old or strategy games and with woled inky blacks, I don't even notice the black bars around the screen.

I didn't like the finale, or much of the whole season of the final season of The Flash, and while I'd prefer post a fix for the whole season, for right now, only the finale to the season as is, is what I'm presenting for now. Here are the ideas that, if He wills, God has blessed me with for this:
Barry, back in the present day, realizes he has to get to Iris and superspeeds to her, as her contractions get more frequent. He reaches her, and she tearfully grateful to see him, them hugging and kissing. The doctors tell her that it's almost time for her to give birth. Iris asks Barry if he'll be there with her. He promises, but Barry's confidence in that promise wanes, concern showing on his face.
From that we cut to the negative speedforce construct of Barry's home, where Zoom, suffering from the effects of the time wraiths, appears. godspeed appearing soon after, in full costume, him having been pulled from his iron heights cell and his memory restored (Barry had it erased at the end of season 7). He's crazed, raging, demanding to know how he got here. Zoom dismisses him, seeing him as a pretender speedster, someone the Flash must've captured. Reverse Flash appears from the upstairs, explaining where they are and that Barry didn't put them here. Reverse Flash mocks godspeed, along with calling Zoom's scheme derivative. Zoom threatens Reverse Flash, while godspeed's fragile ego can't take being mocked, ranting, only for Savitar to appear, backhanding godspeed into the wall. Savitar (being a version of Barry) immediately recognizes Zoom and Reverse Flash and tries to kill them, a fight beginning to start (Reverse Flash rejects Savitar as a Barry Allen, stating that he's a shallow copy, Zoom finding an evil version of Barry amusing, stating that he knew Barry was just like him, which only enrages Savitar even more, stating that he's nothing like any of them), until Eddie emerges, telling them that he brought them there and that they all have one other thing in common, that they could never beat The Flash alone. Savitar has a shaken response to Eddie being alive. Eddie pitches his scheme, that he wants Barry gone, so that he can be the hero that he should've been, not forgotten like he was. Reverse Flash belittles Eddie. Eddie shows what power he has. Reverse Flash remains unimpressed. Eddie asks if they're willing to destroy the Flash once and for all.
Eddie's connection to the negative speedforce is causing a negative speedforce singularity, creating red lighting clouds that are crackling and striking lighting everywhere, it threatening to tear apart the city like a twister of lightning.
Joe asks Cecile to marry him in the first half of the episode, because he's afraid something may happen. Cecile decides that she doesn't have to choose between heroism and her family, deciding that heroes are needed everywhere, opting to live her life and leave central city to live with Joe and their daughter, remarking that her other daughter lives there as well. Joe jokingly asks that she has another daughter and she laughs and slaps him on the arm.
Kione speaks to Barry about balance and nature or whatever and they conclude that the speedforce is connected to the physical plain by Barry, like the negative speedforce was by Thawne, realizing that the negative speedforce is energy, it's not a being, it doesn't have a consciousness as it's purpose is only to be an opposite polarity to the positive speedforce, so every dark trait of the negative speedforce is a magnification of the darkness of the avatars for it, like an echo chamber, and Eobard was the first person to develop the energy bridge to it and use it. Kione releases her energy to give Barry a way to enter the negative speedforce (revealing her energy to be that of a life force), and Caitlin is restored to herself, just in time for the completion of the finale.
Chillblaine gives Caitlin his freeze gauntlets as a way for himself to let go and for and to give Caitlin a connection to Frost in using ice tech.
Wally is initially pitted against Savitar but fears his anger and trauma at facing Savitar because he's a version of Barry and because of what Savitar did to him, so Nora takes him on instead at first and Wally fights Zoom (as a reference to Hunter Zolomon being Wally comic enemy). Wally and Nora's fights criss-cross with eachother. Savitar doesn't know who Nora is, but feels a familiarity with her. Savitar is going stab her when he has a realization, that she's his daughter and he's about to kill Nora, him seeing himself as Reverse Flash in that moment, this shaking him, which Wally sees as he's going against Zoom.
godspeed and his speedforce clones are used as fodder for Cecile, Allegra and Chester, Chester's dimension powers activating and that helping to stop him, with Bart arriving to bring the final blow.
Wally (in a culmination of him seeking a sense of peace by reconciling his anger and resentment with Barry, and Savitar, by convincing him to do what's right) convinces Savitar that he can do what's right and let his pain and anger go when he sees Barry's daughter as a representation of the bright future he thought was impossible, and, when Zoom tries to kill Nora, Savitar betrays the villains and helps Caitlin (her using chillblaine's freezing gauntlets) to stop Zoom. Jay Garrick arriving, saying he's sorry he's late and snatching up Zoom, locking him up in a cell, telling him that now the shoe is on the other foot.
Cisco shows up and protects Iris from Reverse Flash when he goes to kill Iris before she gives birth.
Cisco boasts that he's paid for a year supply of diapers for Iris and Barry's child. Iris gives birth to twins. Barry says to Cisco, "we're gonna need more diapers". He and Iris hold their daughter and son. Nora Francine Dawn Allen and Joseph Henry Donald Allen. It's Nora and Bart. Iris named them without thinking, her and Barry realizing in a confused state that it doesn't make sense. Bart tells them that "Bart" is actually a nickname. Holding his children, and seeing that Savitar has changed, leads Barry to realize what he has to do.
Barry faces Eddie, using the energy connection Kione gave him to reach into the negative speedforce and transport himself there. Barry tells Eddie what his team has been doing, trying to kill their friends Iris, their daughter, as Eddie refuses to believe it, stating that he controls them through the negative speedforce. Barry tells him that the speedforce is an extension of Reverse Flash's own darkness and he's letting it make Eddie into him.
This enrages Eddie, who attacks Barry, as he proclaims that he's not a villain, that he's always been the hero, that Barry took away everything, reversed his life, dragged him into hell. Barry uses every ounce of his speed to deflect Eddie's attacks, as Eddie throws everything at him, the negative speedforce manifesting Barry's childhood home around them, with his dead parents on the floor, their fight tearing up the house as Flash and Reverse Flash's did, Eddie's eyes glowing red, as he yells at Barry to fight back. Barry tells him no, that Eddie is a hero, that he knows that and he won't hurt him, because it's not Eddie's fault. Eddie's power wanes as does Barry's, them left exhausted.
Eddie tells Barry that it should've been him, that Barry should've been the one who died. Barry tells Eddie that if he wants his life he'll have to kill him, but he knows he won't because he knows deep down he's still the hero that gave his life to protect people. Eddie uses his superspeed in a final gasp and grabs Barry by the throat, vibrating his hand to bring into Barry's chest, but hesitating, his mind torn apart by his confusion of his own thoughts and the echoing thoughts of the negative speedforce which are sounding more and more like Thawne's, him being unable to tell the difference. Barry tells him that there's no such thing as coincidence, that they're here by God's design and he can choose to do the right thing. Eddie yells out in pain and agony, trapped in mental torment. Barry says that he can help Eddie, then pulling out his trump card, grabbing Eddie's hand and absorbing the negative speedforce from Eddie, giving him his own speedforce in the process, their speedforces crackling together, red and yellow intermingling in eachother's eyes.
This breaks the negative speedforce's hold on Eddie. As this happens, Reverse Flash realizes it and does everything he can to stop Barry, because Barry doing this detaches RF from the negative speedforce for good, his connection to it totally destroyed, as Eddie, the hold of the negative speedforce over him broken, takes control of it and makes it submit to his will, realizing in horror that Barry's absorption of the negative speedforce is killing him. Eddie realizes that he knew this would happen, distraught, saying that he has a wife and kids, asking him why he would give his life like that. Barry says he told him, because Eddie's a hero and he doesn't want that to be lost.
The negative speedforce singularity storm is still raging around the city. Barry tells him the only way to stop it is from inside, and only someone with the negative speedforce and it'll kill them. Eddie begins to do it, as it's his fault and it may ensure the negative speedforce energy doesn't consume Barry too. But Barry stops Eddie, incapacitates him, and tells him that he's given enough. Barry runs into the negative speedforce singularity and superspeeds around the inside and the energy release from his seeming death within the eye of that singularity closes it, as a parallel to both the Pilot and season 1 finale. We see the lightning that Barry's energy of his body turned into flash throughout the speedforce.
Zoom and godspeed disintegrate in connection to this. But Savitar isn't. He questions why this is the case.
Eddie brings Iris the news, her being devastated, as everyone else mourns as well.
Savitar, seeing this, with contemplation, calls upon to Spectre Oliver to do to him what the negative forces did with Eobard, so this world can have the Flash, the children can have their dad, Iris her husband and the others their friend, to replace his energy with Barry's. He relinquishes the identity of the false god, confesses that he knows he's not a god and never was, that Spectre isn't one, that Spectre is a servant of God in the world, acknowledging it as God's will that he's still alive, for this purpose. It happens, his energy is replaced (but not in pain and agony like Eobard but in his repentance and acceptance of God's will for him), with Barry's, Barry manifesting in a crackle of lightning energy, alive.
Barry, having returned, is welcomed home to a party with Iris, baby Nora & Bart, Cisco, Caitlin, Adult Nora & Bart, Joe, Cecile, Wells, Jay and his wife Joan, and Wally (maybe Jesse and Harry as well?) as Barry makes his peace with Eddie and even visits Thawne in normal human prison, thanking him for ensuring he got his powers in this timeline, as it helped him become a hero, as Cisco and Caitlin do the same, leaving a full of rage totally normal human Thawne alone with himself. Maybe Eddie has something to say as well?
End the series on Barry giving the impossible speech to his babies as we flashback to what happened when Barry was turned into the lightning and we see the lightning strike Barry for the first time. (maybe we still see Barry release lightning to strike others) And maybe end on his children's eyes flashing lightning?
Please review and tell me what you think!

I didn't like the finale, or much of the whole season of the final season of The Flash, and while I'd prefer post a fix for the whole season, for right now, only the finale to the season as is, is what I'm presenting for now. Here are the ideas that, if He wills, God has blessed me with for this:
Barry, back in the present day, realizes he has to get to Iris and superspeeds to her, as her contractions get more frequent. He reaches her, and she tearfully grateful to see him, them hugging and kissing. The doctors tell her that it's almost time for her to give birth. Iris asks Barry if he'll be there with her. He promises, but Barry's confidence in that promise wanes, concern showing on his face.
From that we cut to the negative speedforce construct of Barry's home, where Zoom, suffering from the effects of the time wraiths, appears. godspeed appearing soon after, in full costume, him having been pulled from his iron heights cell and his memory restored (Barry had it erased at the end of season 7). He's crazed, raging, demanding to know how he got here. Zoom dismisses him, seeing him as a pretender speedster, someone the Flash must've captured. Reverse Flash appears from the upstairs, explaining where they are and that Barry didn't put them here. Reverse Flash mocks godspeed, along with calling Zoom's scheme derivative. Zoom threatens Reverse Flash, while godspeed's fragile ego can't take being mocked, ranting, only for Savitar to appear, backhanding godspeed into the wall. Savitar (being a version of Barry) immediately recognizes Zoom and Reverse Flash and tries to kill them, a fight beginning to start (Reverse Flash rejects Savitar as a Barry Allen, stating that he's a shallow copy, Zoom finding an evil version of Barry amusing, stating that he knew Barry was just like him, which only enrages Savitar even more, stating that he's nothing like any of them), until Eddie emerges, telling them that he brought them there and that they all have one other thing in common, that they could never beat The Flash alone. Savitar has a shaken response to Eddie being alive. Eddie pitches his scheme, that he wants Barry gone, so that he can be the hero that he should've been, not forgotten like he was. Reverse Flash belittles Eddie. Eddie shows what power he has. Reverse Flash remains unimpressed. Eddie asks if they're willing to destroy the Flash once and for all.
Eddie's connection to the negative speedforce is causing a negative speedforce singularity, creating red lighting clouds that are crackling and striking lighting everywhere, it threatening to tear apart the city like a twister of lightning.
Joe asks Cecile to marry him in the first half of the episode, because he's afraid something may happen. Cecile decides that she doesn't have to choose between heroism and her family, deciding that heroes are needed everywhere, opting to live her life and leave central city to live with Joe and their daughter, remarking that her other daughter lives there as well. Joe jokingly asks that she has another daughter and she laughs and slaps him on the arm.
Kione speaks to Barry about balance and nature or whatever and they conclude that the speedforce is connected to the physical plain by Barry, like the negative speedforce was by Thawne, realizing that the negative speedforce is energy, it's not a being, it doesn't have a consciousness as it's purpose is only to be an opposite polarity to the positive speedforce, so every dark trait of the negative speedforce is a magnification of the darkness of the avatars for it, like an echo chamber, and Eobard was the first person to develop the energy bridge to it and use it. Kione releases her energy to give Barry a way to enter the negative speedforce (revealing her energy to be that of a life force), and Caitlin is restored to herself, just in time for the completion of the finale.
Chillblaine gives Caitlin his freeze gauntlets as a way for himself to let go and for and to give Caitlin a connection to Frost in using ice tech.
Wally is initially pitted against Savitar but fears his anger and trauma at facing Savitar because he's a version of Barry and because of what Savitar did to him, so Nora takes him on instead at first and Wally fights Zoom (as a reference to Hunter Zolomon being Wally comic enemy). Wally and Nora's fights criss-cross with eachother. Savitar doesn't know who Nora is, but feels a familiarity with her. Savitar is going stab her when he has a realization, that she's his daughter and he's about to kill Nora, him seeing himself as Reverse Flash in that moment, this shaking him, which Wally sees as he's going against Zoom.
godspeed and his speedforce clones are used as fodder for Cecile, Allegra and Chester, Chester's dimension powers activating and that helping to stop him, with Bart arriving to bring the final blow.
Wally (in a culmination of him seeking a sense of peace by reconciling his anger and resentment with Barry, and Savitar, by convincing him to do what's right) convinces Savitar that he can do what's right and let his pain and anger go when he sees Barry's daughter as a representation of the bright future he thought was impossible, and, when Zoom tries to kill Nora, Savitar betrays the villains and helps Caitlin (her using chillblaine's freezing gauntlets) to stop Zoom. Jay Garrick arriving, saying he's sorry he's late and snatching up Zoom, locking him up in a cell, telling him that now the shoe is on the other foot.
Cisco shows up and protects Iris from Reverse Flash when he goes to kill Iris before she gives birth.
Cisco boasts that he's paid for a year supply of diapers for Iris and Barry's child. Iris gives birth to twins. Barry says to Cisco, "we're gonna need more diapers". He and Iris hold their daughter and son. Nora Francine Dawn Allen and Joseph Henry Donald Allen. It's Nora and Bart. Iris named them without thinking, her and Barry realizing in a confused state that it doesn't make sense. Bart tells them that "Bart" is actually a nickname. Holding his children, and seeing that Savitar has changed, leads Barry to realize what he has to do.
Barry faces Eddie, using the energy connection Kione gave him to reach into the negative speedforce and transport himself there. Barry tells Eddie what his team has been doing, trying to kill their friends Iris, their daughter, as Eddie refuses to believe it, stating that he controls them through the negative speedforce. Barry tells him that the speedforce is an extension of Reverse Flash's own darkness and he's letting it make Eddie into him.
This enrages Eddie, who attacks Barry, as he proclaims that he's not a villain, that he's always been the hero, that Barry took away everything, reversed his life, dragged him into hell. Barry uses every ounce of his speed to deflect Eddie's attacks, as Eddie throws everything at him, the negative speedforce manifesting Barry's childhood home around them, with his dead parents on the floor, their fight tearing up the house as Flash and Reverse Flash's did, Eddie's eyes glowing red, as he yells at Barry to fight back. Barry tells him no, that Eddie is a hero, that he knows that and he won't hurt him, because it's not Eddie's fault. Eddie's power wanes as does Barry's, them left exhausted.
Eddie tells Barry that it should've been him, that Barry should've been the one who died. Barry tells Eddie that if he wants his life he'll have to kill him, but he knows he won't because he knows deep down he's still the hero that gave his life to protect people. Eddie uses his superspeed in a final gasp and grabs Barry by the throat, vibrating his hand to bring into Barry's chest, but hesitating, his mind torn apart by his confusion of his own thoughts and the echoing thoughts of the negative speedforce which are sounding more and more like Thawne's, him being unable to tell the difference. Barry tells him that there's no such thing as coincidence, that they're here by God's design and he can choose to do the right thing. Eddie yells out in pain and agony, trapped in mental torment. Barry says that he can help Eddie, then pulling out his trump card, grabbing Eddie's hand and absorbing the negative speedforce from Eddie, giving him his own speedforce in the process, their speedforces crackling together, red and yellow intermingling in eachother's eyes.
This breaks the negative speedforce's hold on Eddie. As this happens, Reverse Flash realizes it and does everything he can to stop Barry, because Barry doing this detaches RF from the negative speedforce for good, his connection to it totally destroyed, as Eddie, the hold of the negative speedforce over him broken, takes control of it and makes it submit to his will, realizing in horror that Barry's absorption of the negative speedforce is killing him. Eddie realizes that he knew this would happen, distraught, saying that he has a wife and kids, asking him why he would give his life like that. Barry says he told him, because Eddie's a hero and he doesn't want that to be lost.
The negative speedforce singularity storm is still raging around the city. Barry tells him the only way to stop it is from inside, and only someone with the negative speedforce and it'll kill them. Eddie begins to do it, as it's his fault and it may ensure the negative speedforce energy doesn't consume Barry too. But Barry stops Eddie, incapacitates him, and tells him that he's given enough. Barry runs into the negative speedforce singularity and superspeeds around the inside and the energy release from his seeming death within the eye of that singularity closes it, as a parallel to both the Pilot and season 1 finale. We see the lightning that Barry's energy of his body turned into flash throughout the speedforce.
Zoom and godspeed disintegrate in connection to this. But Savitar isn't. He questions why this is the case.
Eddie brings Iris the news, her being devastated, as everyone else mourns as well.
Savitar, seeing this, with contemplation, calls upon to Spectre Oliver to do to him what the negative forces did with Eobard, so this world can have the Flash, the children can have their dad, Iris her husband and the others their friend, to replace his energy with Barry's. He relinquishes the identity of the false god, confesses that he knows he's not a god and never was, that Spectre isn't one, that Spectre is a servant of God in the world, acknowledging it as God's will that he's still alive, for this purpose. It happens, his energy is replaced (but not in pain and agony like Eobard but in his repentance and acceptance of God's will for him), with Barry's, Barry manifesting in a crackle of lightning energy, alive.
Barry, having returned, is welcomed home to a party with Iris, baby Nora & Bart, Cisco, Caitlin, Adult Nora & Bart, Joe, Cecile, Wells, Jay and his wife Joan, and Wally (maybe Jesse and Harry as well?) as Barry makes his peace with Eddie and even visits Thawne in normal human prison, thanking him for ensuring he got his powers in this timeline, as it helped him become a hero, as Cisco and Caitlin do the same, leaving a full of rage totally normal human Thawne alone with himself. Maybe Eddie has something to say as well?
End the series on Barry giving the impossible speech to his babies as we flashback to what happened when Barry was turned into the lightning and we see the lightning strike Barry for the first time. (maybe we still see Barry release lightning to strike others) And maybe end on his children's eyes flashing lightning?
Please review and tell me what you think!

https://imgur.com/a/1IrtWDX
(I'm probably gonna regret putting my pictures on here but hey, it's 2024)
Hi there, I'm Dreamer.
Last year, I underwent a mental health treatment journey from September - February. I spent a month in a residential facility outside of Nashville for a month. After I was released, I spent a week and a half in a PHP in Chattanooga. It wasn't the right fit for me, so I drove myself to Knoxville, spent three and a half months in PHP, stepped down to IOP for two months and then graduated from the program.
I moved into a sober living program in East Knoxville in February and stayed there until March. My dad convinced me to come back to Nashville and stay with him and my step family for a while; hadn't seen my entire family in months and didn't exactly receive the warmest welcome... Needless to say, shit went sideways, was uninsured and couldn't get the meds I needed, my mental health tanked and I eventually started drinking/using THC to self-medicate.
Decided to say "Screw it, I'm trying this again" and I was in a recovery center in Kentucky for 18 days. Left there yesterday and now I'm back in Knoxville at my old PHP program. What happened sucks and I'm not the proudest of relapsing after having months of sobriety but I'm feeling optimistic and motivated... I just want to get back to feeling okay again, you know?
Tomorrow will mark two weeks sober.
Anyway, now that I've probably scared everyone off... Where do I start?
I'm 26 years old, an Aquarius and an INFJ-T. I'm originally from Nashville, as you might have guessed. I'm very thicc but I lost a fair amount of weight during my first treatment stint and I'm trying to maintain it. I'm also 5'7" so I'm kinda tall-ish...?
My hobbies/interests: Writing, music, photography, TV/movies/YouTube, people watching, traveling and so much more that I can't think of. I started journaling again too (I stopped after I last got out of treatment) and it's like I never left.
I love animals (especially cats, dogs and snakes!) I have my own car (though it's currently back in Nashville and I probably won't get it until I go into IOP again) and most of my sanity haha.
Just an FYI, I do vape. I don't do it all day long but it's still a habit. I don't smoke cigs, though, because they're nasty and smelly. I want to quit vaping altogether but it is what it is right now. We all need our vices.
What am I looking for in a guy?

1. Someone the same height or taller than me (AKA 5'7"+)
2. Someone with nice hair (I've always been really attracted to men with medium to long hair because I love playing with it)
3. Someone with positive qualities such as kindness, honesty, affection, gentleness, emotional maturity, etc...
4. Someone between the ages of 23-35 (I may be willing to make an exception on a case-by-case basis, but absolutely ONLY if you match everything else I'm looking for. With that being said, if you are below 21 or above 40, I'm not going to respond)
5. Someone who's chivalrous (Holding doors open, being cognizant of my needs and feelings, lending a hand, etc)
6. Someone who is a hopeless romantic. I want all the sappy letters, the curated love playlists, the intimate talks... All of it.
7. Someone in tune with their (and their partner's) love languages. My top three love languages are physical touch, words of affirmation and quality time... But ultimately, I love every one of them
8. Someone who enjoys going out and doing fun stuff but also enjoys hanging out at home... Spontaneity is awesome!
9. Someone who loves animals! I'd love to adopt a kitten one day, but I'm also interested in adopting a senior cat too. They need just as much love after all
10. Someone who either lives in the surrounding region and/or is willing to plan to come visit regularly. (I'd love to visit you as well)! I want us to spend time together and build a connection. I believe long distance relationships CAN be successful if there is consistent face-to-face interaction. I'm not too keen on international connections unless, of course, you have the time and means to come and see me regularly
    1. Someone who has a car, so we can drive around and do stuff. I can be your very own passenger princess, complete with absolute bangers and lots of snacks!
    2. Someone who enjoys meaningful conversations. I hate small talk, one word answers or when someone ignores my input/thoughts. If you can't communicate or don't like to keep in touch throughout the day, please don't bother.

I want someone to hold hands with, run errands together, give random kisses and hugs, cuddle up on cold nights and rainy days, take drives and see where the road leads us... I want you to be my one and only. By the way, as far as intimacy goes, I need to take things really slow for personal reasons. I can explain more about it once we know each other better and I feel comfortable telling you. So if you are going to be pushy or judge/ shame/ridicule me, don't talk to me.
There's tons more I could say about myself but I'll leave it there for now.
When you message me, please tell me your age and location, send a recent SFW picture of yourself and please confirm that you're willing and able to meet in person and spend time together as our relationship buds and blossoms.
And you can include whatever else you'd like to tell me about yourself; longer messages catch my eye for sure. Just please don't say "Hey," or any other similar greeting because I won't respond to that. Also, sneak the word "Spooky" into your first message so I know that you read through my entire post.
I hope to hear from you soon! Stay sweet!

https://imgur.com/a/1IrtWDX
(I'm probably gonna regret putting my pictures on here but hey, it's 2024)
Hi there, I'm Dreamer.
Last year, I underwent a mental health treatment journey from September - February. I spent a month in a residential facility outside of Nashville for a month. After I was released, I spent a week and a half in a PHP in Chattanooga. It wasn't the right fit for me, so I drove myself to Knoxville, spent three and a half months in PHP, stepped down to IOP for two months and then graduated from the program.
I moved into a sober living program in East Knoxville in February and stayed there until March. My dad convinced me to come back to Nashville and stay with him and my step family for a while; hadn't seen my entire family in months and didn't exactly receive the warmest welcome... Needless to say, shit went sideways, was uninsured and couldn't get the meds I needed, my mental health tanked and I eventually started drinking/using THC to self-medicate.
Decided to say "Fuck it, I'm trying this again" and I was in a recovery center in Kentucky for 18 days. Left there yesterday and now I'm back in Knoxville at my old PHP program. What happened sucks and I'm not the proudest of relapsing after having months of sobriety but I'm feeling optimistic and motivated... I just want to get back to feeling okay again, you know?
Tomorrow will mark two weeks sober.
Anyway, now that I've probably scared everyone off... Where do I start?
I'm 26 years old, an Aquarius and an INFJ-T. I'm originally from Nashville, as you might have guessed. I'm very thicc but I lost a fair amount of weight during my first treatment stint and I'm trying to maintain it. I'm also 5'7" so I'm kinda tall-ish...?
My hobbies/interests: Writing, music, photography, TV/movies/YouTube, people watching, traveling and so much more that I can't think of. I started journaling again too (I stopped after I last got out of treatment) and it's like I never left.
I love animals (especially cats, dogs and snakes!) I have my own car (though it's currently back in Nashville and I probably won't get it until I go into IOP again) and most of my sanity haha.
Just an FYI, I do vape. I don't do it all day long but it's still a habit. I don't smoke cigs, though, because they're nasty and smelly. I want to quit vaping altogether but it is what it is right now. We all need our vices.
What am I looking for in a guy?

1. Someone the same height or taller than me (AKA 5'7"+)
2. Someone with nice hair (I've always been really attracted to men with medium to long hair because I love playing with it)
3. Someone with positive qualities such as kindness, honesty, affection, gentleness, emotional maturity, etc...
4. Someone between the ages of 23-35 (I may be willing to make an exception on a case-by-case basis, but absolutely ONLY if you match everything else I'm looking for. With that being said, if you are below 21 or above 40, I'm not going to respond)
5. Someone who's chivalrous (Holding doors open, being cognizant of my needs and feelings, lending a hand, etc)
6. Someone who is a hopeless romantic. I want all the sappy letters, the curated love playlists, the intimate talks... All of it.
7. Someone in tune with their (and their partner's) love languages. My top three love languages are physical touch, words of affirmation and quality time... But ultimately, I love every one of them
8. Someone who enjoys going out and doing fun stuff but also enjoys hanging out at home... Spontaneity is awesome!
9. Someone who loves animals! I'd love to adopt a kitten one day, but I'm also interested in adopting a senior cat too. They need just as much love after all
10. Someone who either lives in the surrounding region and/or is willing to plan to come visit regularly. (I'd love to visit you as well)! I want us to spend time together and build a connection. I believe long distance relationships CAN be successful if there is consistent face-to-face interaction. I'm not too keen on international connections unless, of course, you have the time and means to come and see me regularly
    1. Someone who has a car, so we can drive around and do stuff. I can be your very own passenger princess, complete with absolute bangers and lots of snacks!
    2. Someone who enjoys meaningful conversations. I hate small talk, one word answers or when someone ignores my input/thoughts. If you can't communicate or don't like to keep in touch throughout the day, please don't bother.

I want someone to hold hands with, run errands together, give random kisses and hugs, cuddle up on cold nights and rainy days, take drives and see where the road leads us... I want you to be my one and only. By the way, as far as intimacy goes, I need to take things really slow for personal reasons. I can explain more about it once we know each other better and I feel comfortable telling you. So if you are going to be pushy or judge/ shame/ridicule me, don't talk to me.
There's tons more I could say about myself but I'll leave it there for now.
When you message me, please tell me your age and location, send a recent SFW picture of yourself and please confirm that you're willing and able to meet in person and spend time together as our relationship buds and blossoms.
And you can include whatever else you'd like to tell me about yourself; longer messages catch my eye for sure. Just please don't say "Hey," or any other similar greeting because I won't respond to that. Also, sneak the word "Spooky" into your first message so I know that you read through my entire post.
I hope to hear from you soon! Stay sweet!

Hey All! Trying to run NDI as video between rooms in our recording studio.... this brings up an interesting use case because ideally we would need zero latency for audio and video sync since we are recording live audio.
I bought a few Kiloview N6 encodedecoders and am streaming off AIDA hdmi cameras. When viewing the NDI stream on my laptop through OBS there is minimal latency, however when decoding the stream through another N6 it's imparting a significant amount of latency. I'm trying to wrap my head around why the n6 would be adding latency.
I originally intended to use the n6's as encodedecoders so I could have a camera and a screen in each room... however I learned after that you can't encode/decode simultaneously on one device (you would need 2 N6's in each room to encode AND decode). This is a bit of a bummer since they are $400/ea. As an option i bought a couple Link Pi ENC1-v3's and they seem much more user configurable than the Kiloview N6's. They also can Encode and Decode at the same time which is a plus.... They're also cheaper.... However i'm having an issue with those as well.... The NDI encoded stream generated by the Link Pi devices can be seen by the N6's, but NOT the other Linkpi devices. I'm thinking that there may be a stream parameter that is being encoded that the N6's are having a hard time decoding or are causing them to have to do extra processing, but i can't for the life of me figure it out.
I'm going to do a quick test to see if there is Latency between two N6's and will report back.... but starting to think i will just switch to the Link Pi's if i can figure out why they won't see each other streams just because they can encode/decode and they are less than half as much/ea

We've arrived at pre-patch day and many fundamental class functions along with major expansion components such as Void Storage are still not working or have been cut because they are out of dev resources. Forget anything related to actual Cataclysm content such as Vashj'ir being a total mess when attempting to interact with mobs, requiring all sorts of zone-in, zone-out jank just to be able to do anything, or the heaps of other broken quests game-wide, let's just focus on what we'll be doing in pre-patch, playing WoTLK with Cataclysm class changes.
The hands down best 30% buff Lich King main tank, Feral Druids, have completely broken dps and threat generation at the moment. Are feral players just supposed stop playing the game and wait for Blizzard to get around to eventually fixing it? How about Fire Mages combustion being completely broken? Are they going to wait to fix them until a sufficient majority of the mage player base is back playing Fire again the way they waited until WoTLK Phase 3 to finally fix WoTLK Fire Mage? That was after they specifically stated during WoTLK Phase 1 when pestered on their own GitHub that they had engineers investigate the ignite tick issue and decided it wasn't worth the effort to fix. Incredible. Top tier AAA dev effort.
Death Knight runes aren't correctly converting when casting certain abilities. Hunter pets are completely broken on builds of the Beta that still had the intended Cataclysm pet systems. Another case of "We'll fix it eventually, but we're going to ship Cataclysm without it anyways and just use the Wrath pet system." Shadow Priest mana regeneration is completely borked. Probably another case of under-the-hood calculations still attempting to use Wrath systems, even though Shadow Priests in Cataclysm no longer make use of Spirit. Several enchants simply do not work when applied to gear with the new engineering mod + enchant combo to gloves, etc.
How about the thousands of people that have been busy collecting the cool gear that will be getting removed in Cataclysm and have very, very little bag space to work with before Void Storage is in? Oh, well, we just copy-pasted the retail collections system in, forgot to update several of the menus from the Wrath version, AND we're going to cut Void Storage too! A+ effort Blizzard. Pretending as if people didn't work hard for much of the gear that they've obtained over the years now and will just willing delete all of it in hopes it doesn't just randomly bug out and disappear forever some day with a botched patch the way it has already occurred in retail. We all know customer service doesn't exist for Blizzard to help. We want Void Storage. If that's too difficult for the two people working on this game and since Void Storage is literally just a second bank, just add more bank tabs. Many, many of them. How can a AAA game like World of Warcraft have extremely limited player banking yet an actual small indie game like Old School Runescape can effectively have unlimited banking potential for players?
The original plan was almost certainly always to get Cata Classic out in the same release window as TBC Classic. That's all fine and dandy until you realize their backup plan was always going to be an August release if they couldn't get it together in time. Instead of assuring they release (re-release!) a product in a half decent state they're going to shove it out the door even if all the pieces aren't there. The number of problems still in the Beta/PTR build, which is the same pre-patch build we're getting today, are staggering.
Blizzard is either deliberately attempting to burn the original WoW Classic release to the ground because they have no long-term plan or vision to maintain it besides regurgitating expansion after expansion which further just morphs Classic into current Retail until you can't even decipher a difference or have people at the helm that have zero clue on what makes Classic, Classic, and why people play it. There is zero integrity to this company, and they'd rather force a half-baked mess out the door before earnings reports instead of actually serving a decent product.
I'm sure a mountain of additional issues will come out of the woodwork later today and in the next few days as the masses jump into pre-patch and really put this broken build of the game to the test. Godspeed to everyone attempting to raid in ICC tonight. I'm sure we're going to have a comedic shitshow of things not working left and right.