This is hell.
It is not the way that I expected it to be. I had envisioned a lake of fire, filled with tortured souls that had for their entire lives pillaged, raped and murdered, those who deserved such a fate for all the pain they had inflicted upon others. I had imagined brimstone, sulphur and poisonous fumes being expelled from the cracked and bleeding ground. These images however, were not my own. They were the images that were screeched to me by the priest who stood on his pulpit every holy day, when my family went to church.
I was afraid, that was without a doubt. That was how they kept us in line, the masses, by fear. They controlled us by our stupidity and folly to believe in men dressed in white robes, who preached that they were able to give out the secrets of the afterlife and allow people into that wonderful heaven, if they only followed them.
Now that I look back and remember, it was those same holy men who were actually the idiots. They were afraid of what awaited them – a black void most thought – and they fought to believe in something else. They made up their religion in the hopes that it would comfort them long after their hearts had failed, their lungs expelling that last breath.
When I found out that I was a Pillar Guardian, the one of Balance, I was freed from the tyranny of those religious zealots, of their religion. Their grasp on my mind was released and I was finally able to truly understand the cycle that Nosgoth followed of life, death and rebirth. The power that I had over those old and doddering men. And I was a woman besides.
Their hell would never be able to touch me. I was Ariel, a sorceress of the Circle of Nine, invulnerable. When I spoke, people listened not out of fear but out of respect. I spread a new kind of knowledge of the world beyond, the one that was the truth that after we die, we are reborn again and again. It was more comforting for people to hear this than to believe that they would be thrown into a lake of fire for the rest of eternity with no hope of respite.
Hell could never touch me, but then it did. It was one of the Dark's entities that killed me, murdered me in cold blood through the body of one of my friends. I was in shock and disbelief as my spirit separated from my body and floated through the ether, looking for something that I could not find. If I had been killed by a demon, then wouldn't I go to hell and the damnation that for so long I thought had not existed? I panicked; I didn't know where I was or what would happen to me next. I reached out and touched the one thing that had always been stable in my life – the Pillars. And thus, I was bound to them.
I have seen them crumble and fall into decay. I have been unable to do anything to halt it. I have been trapped into this hell of mine and I haven't found my way to leave. As I float here, day after day, I recall a line spoken so long ago by a priest that I had nearly forgotten it.
"Hell is not always fire and brimstone. Hell can be a damming place of your own choosing, placed far from the light with no hope of salvation. It can take any form. But you will know, once you are the furthest from the light, that you have entered your own Hell."