Zeke stumbled through the door, and the second he felt himself fully reach the other side, he sank to his hands and knees. But he didn’t let himself break down. Not again. Instead, he just knelt there and recentered his mind. He’d died countless times, but it didn’t feel quite as real as his experiences in the Circle of Heresy. In any case, he felt mentally stronger now.

  “Being used to abuse doesn’t make you stronger,” Eveline said in his mind. “It just means you’ve grown callouses.”

  “I know,” Zeke admitted, sitting back on his heels and looking around. The hall was a grand thing made of red brick and stretching as far as he could see. Every so often, there were arches on either side of the wall, though Zeke was too far away to see if they led anywhere. Maybe they were just decoration.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Eveline asked.

  Zeke shook his head. “I don’t think it’ll help,” he answered. “What do you make of the woman? You saw her, right? Who was she?”

  “She was obviously the person in charge.”

  “Of Hell?”

  “No – of that particular circle. Or maybe over the whole thing. It’s hard to say when I couldn’t feel her properly,” Eveline explained. “I’d locked myself behind so many layers of defenses, I could barely even see her.”

  “She didn’t seem evil.”

  “I don’t think any of them are evil, per se. They are entities with purpose, Ezekiel. I don’t believe good or evil come into the equation,” she stated.

  “Are you saying they have no agency? They’re gods, Eveline. They have immense power.”

  “Maybe that’s the nature of godhood. They can only fulfil their purpose. They can only be what they’re meant to be,” she said. “All power has limitations.”

  “So, if I become a god, will I be limited as well?”

  She didn’t say, but the answer was obvious. If he accepted that ascending to godhood – instead of just stepping onto the Ethereal Plane like a normal, if powerful, person – meant letting the divine energy change him, then it stood to reason that it would come with a significant cost.

  “I don’t know if I can accept that,” he said, resting his hands on his thighs. “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “I’m fairly certain that you don’t have a choice in the matter,” Eveline stated. “The second you started to cultivate divine energy, you put yourself on a very narrow path. At this point, the only other option is to simply give it up, which we both know you won’t do.”

  “I need it.”

  “I know.”

  “If I don’t have that divine energy, I’ll die.”

  “I know that too,” Eveline said. “But you have to ask yourself a question, Ezekiel – would you rather live a limited life as a god or die as a free mortal?”

  Zeke didn’t even have to answer because they both knew what he would say. The reality was that the core of who he was – of who he had become – was wrapped up in an implacable ability to simply endure. It didn’t matter if that referred to fighting an endless battle against a god or dying tens of thousands of times and coming back for more. He just didn’t know how to give up. He was fundamentally incapable of giving in. It was his defining characteristic, and one he couldn’t simply discard because he was afraid of what the future might hold.

  If he became a prisoner of his own deification, then he would endure that too.

  “You really don’t ever learn, do you?” she asked. “You continuously charge headlong into unimaginable suffering, heedless of what it’s doing to you. Do you have any idea what that does to me?”

  Zeke admitted that he didn’t.

  “I care about you, Ezekiel. I hate that about who I’ve become,” she said. “There was a time when I didn’t care about anyone or anything but myself and my goals. That pushed me to the pinnacle of Mal’canus. I rose to the top on pure selfishness.”

  “Should I applaud?”

  “Shut up,” she sighed. Zeke imagined her massaging the bridge of her nose. “My point, Ezekiel, is that if that demoness saw what I’ve become, she would be disgusted. I’m a succubus. I’m not supposed to get attached. I’m not supposed to care. I’m meant to use people. To drain them of their strength until they can’t exist without me.”

  “Sounds-”

  “Again, shut up,” she interrupted. “But I care. Against all odds and against every fiber of my nature, I care about you. So, tell me – how do you think it feels for me to watch you do this to yourself? I can’t look away. I can’t ignore it. I don’t feel what you feel, but I am forced to experience the echoes.” She manifested beside him, then immediately looked way. “I can’t imagine what it must have felt like. As a demon, I am well-versed in torture. While angels spend their endless eons floating in the void and waiting to be spat out into heaven, we are tortured. Endlessly. It changes us. Shapes us. It molds us into creatures of self-serving, conniving, evil.

  “We revel in pain, Ezekiel. We practically worship it. But even then, I want nothing more than to look away from what you have been forced to endure,” she revealed. “I want it to end, Zeke. I can’t watch you continue to do this to yourself.”

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  Until that moment, Zeke had looked at each circle as a personal trial. Because Eveline hadn’t been there with him, he had considered it a solitary endeavor. Certainly, he knew she was still there in the back of his mind, but he’d even contemplated what it must’ve been like for her.

  If he had, he might have assumed she simply went to sleep. Or went into a trance. But he’d never considered that she was there and aware through it all.

  “I…I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think about you.”

  She sniffed loudly, then wiped her eyes.

  “What am I doing?” she sighed, looking at her hand. “I am a physical manifestation of an incorporeal spirit. I don’t cry.”

  “It’s okay,” Zeke said, wishing he could comfort her with more than words. He definitely wasn’t much of a hugger – especially when he was still naked and covered in the blood of his enemies – but there was something to human contact that was undeniably calming.

  “If you try to touch me, I will give you a migraine the likes of with you’ve never felt before,” she said, sniffing again as she held up one finger in his direction.

  “I can’t touch you.”

  “I said if you tried. Not if you succeeded.”

  “Fair enough,” he responded, repositioning himself against the wall. He sat there, his hands on his knees as he said, “You know you can talk to me, right? About whatever you’re going through. This doesn’t always have to be about me.”

  “Grow up, Ezekiel. I don’t need to talk. You are not my therapist.”

  “I can be your friend, though,” he offered. “I mean, I am your friend. I’m closer to you than I’ve been to anyone else in my life. You know everything I’m thinking, and I still don’t know that much about you.”

  She’d revealed a little about her original world, which had been dominated by elves. They were not the happy-go-lucky, nature-loving creatures in the stories, either. They were vicious creatures who’d caused the imprisonment of her people. Other than that, though, she’d only told him a few bits and pieces about her life.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked, hovering over him.

  “You’d tell me?” he asked in response.

  She shrugged, then sat beside him. Zeke couldn’t help but notice that the dust on the stone floor didn’t move from her presence. She was just as incorporeal as ever.

  “Probably. You’ll never know unless you ask.”

  Zeke thought about it for a moment, then said, “You look more solid than last time you manifested.”

  “Is that your question? If so, then I think you need to go back to school.”

  He gave a brief chuckle. “I never was much for that. I did what I had to do to get by, but…”

  “You were a bad student?” she gasped. “Color me shocked.”

  “I wasn’t bad. I just want to make that abundantly clear. I just didn’t give it the attention it probably deserved.”

  “That’s the definition of a bad student.”

  “Whatever. So – you want a question?”

  “I don’t want it. You’re the one who brought it up,” she pointed out.

  “Okay – so did you have any friends? Once you ended up in Hell, I mean?” he asked.

  “That…isn’t the kind of place where friendships are formed,” she stated evenly. “I had acquaintances. Allies. No friends, though. There was always the chance that if I let someone get too close, they’d stab me in the back. It happened a few times, there toward the end.

  “That’s the thing about Hell and demons, Ezekiel. We really aren’t that different from those of you who end up on the better end of the universe,” she went on. “We have the same motivators. The same needs. They’re just suppressed by what we experienced before being reborn. Our whole being is twisted out of all semblance of recognition, and to the point where it changes us physically. I was reborn as a fat little imp. Did you know that? Genderless. Barely sentient, much less sapient. Vicious, too. If an imp comes at you, you better kill it, because it will not stop. It just wants to inflict as much pain as possible. Survival is a secondary concern.”

  She shook her head. “It took decades for me to climb out of that and reassert my identity. Even then, I was changed, and not just by what was done to me. Living as an imp – as something that doesn’t fit who you know you’re supposed to be – is debilitating from a psychological perspective. The things I did…well, let’s just say that any barriers to violence I might have harbored were long since gone by the time I regained my sense of identity.”

  “What happened then?” he asked.

  “The same thing that happens to everyone who ends up in Mal’canus,” she answered. “I reached the peak, evolved and reshaped myself into the glorious form you see before you, and descended.”

  “But like you said, no friends?”

  “No one I would bestow with that label,” Eveline answered. “I trusted a few people there at the end. Did you know that the longer we exist as demons, the more chance we have of shrugging off the effects of being tortured? I didn’t. It hits us all differently. Suddenly, I felt this deep sense of shame. It always hit like a lightning bolt, and at the worst times. It was gone just as quickly, but the echoes of the resultant thunder remained long after the guilt had faded.

  “Those were my weakest moments. That’s when I tried to make friends. The others, they saw me coming from a mile away,” she said. “There was one…she was my protégé. A mental mage who had true potential. A sweet and delicate little thing, she awakened my every protective instinct. I sheltered her. I trained her. I showed her how to survive Hell.”

  “She betrayed you?”

  “She was a demon, Ezekiel. Of course she betrayed me. In fact, she had been preying on me the entire time I knew her, using a subtle empathetic bond to make me want to keep her safe. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was a specific type of demon known as a laumes. That’s their whole…thing. And I fell for it. She nearly drained me dry before I realized what she was doing.”

  “What did you do?” asked Zeke.

  “I killed her. But do you know what the worst of it was? She wasn’t even doing it on purpose. It was just what she was. Sure, she used it to her advantage – like an instinct – but she didn’t manipulate me purposefully,” Eveline answered. “Such is the nature of Hell. We don’t do the things we do because we want to. We do them because it is what we were made to be.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zeke said, feeling genuine sympathy. “If I could change it, you know I would.”

  “I know, Ezekiel. I know.”

  After that, they lapsed into an uneasy silence that lasted for a few hours until Zeke was once again prepared to move on. When he was, he picked himself up, then began the long trek down the hall.

  However, when he reached the first arch, he couldn’t help but flinch. Lying there was an emaciated person – Zeke couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, alive or dead – behind a set of thick, iron bars. Immediately, he tried to break them, but despite his immense strength, they refused to budge.

  He spent a long time trying to rescue the prisoner in that cage, but two things quickly became clear. The first was that he didn’t have the ability to accomplish that goal. It was simply impossible. But the second was perhaps even more troubling – despite the noise he was making, both in his attempts at breaking the bars and as he tried to get the person’s attention – they didn’t once move, save for a slight rise and fall that came from drawing breath.

  “Leave them,” Eveline said. “You can’t save everyone, Ezekiel.”

  “I know,” he muttered. But it was still almost impossible to turn away. Still, eventually, he was forced to heed Eveline’s advice.

  As he traversed the remainder of the hall, he found countless other prisoners in similarly dire captivity. Each time, Zeke tried to rescue them – hoping against hope that he might find a weakened bar – but he was never successful. None of them stirred, either. So, when he finally reached the end of the hall and faced the door to the next circle, he was more than angry.

  He let that flow through him as he stepped through and into the Circle of Fraud.