I have felt Hell’s fire, the caress of its flames along my skin, stripping my flesh with its barbed tongue. You can’t imagine the pain if you haven’t experienced it yourself but try to recall grazing yourself as a kid; that stinging pain, sharp and immediate as nerves react with the air, and then try to imagine that intensified by a thousand fold. As the damage runs deeper the pain changes, not worsened, but evolving into an entirely different sensation, one of a deep ache and steady throbbing, pulsing rhythmically like a second heartbeat, as if the pain has a life of its own.
Exposed muscle wet and glistening under the bright lights of a surgeon’s table, after the ruins of a once flawless body have been scraped away, and somehow it no longer seems my own, for how can my limbs be reduced to nothing but useless lumps of meat? Bandages act like a temporary skin, and drugs help ease the suffering, but I can never quite escape it.
And there on my bedside table lies the note that refused to burn no matter how fierce the blaze grew, and to my horror she grabs it and begins to read the invocation. Too damaged even to scream, I can only watch as those unnatural flames ignite once more, his laughter echoing through the hospital as he claims her next, my innocent little girl.
