The Sandwich That Stunned Hell

It's quite an accomplished sandwich. Or series of sandwiches. Either way, you never expected that much from them, so it's just really nice that they were able to get this far and do so much. 

Transcript

My voice is heard often. Far too often.

I despise it. I can hear my thoughts echoing in the world around me. I am a pitiable being. Disgusting. Cruel. Stupid.

And yet, somehow, despite it all, it is thrust upon me to be an important piece of existence. 

Why can’t it, at some point, be somebody else? 

And to that we have all the classic arguments. Even though I am stupid, I am more intelligent than my kin. Even though I am cruel, I can empathize with the pain we inflict on the sinners. Even though my form is misshapen and loathsome, it is naturally more powerful than most others in creation. It is by those parameters, of being better than the worst, that I am made to be more than I would ever want to be.

At times I wonder what my ideal existence would be. I know it is heretical to even pursue the thought. Our ideal existence is one which we were never made. Obviously, right? That is the creed we have bound ourselves by since the dawn of time. To exist is to feel pain. To feel pain is bad. To exist is bad. A syllogism. Nothing more complicated than that. 

And yet it is a simple thought experiment to imagine something different, something better. Something even more joyous than eternal peace in Mother Void’s arms. Something…

Something where it didn’t matter what I was. Not the beast, the monster I was here. The arch-moloch. Ooh, even the title sounds scary. A being with a name that others remember, some fondly, some with hatred, some with fear. To not be any of that…

But I open my multitude of eyes and I am here. Once again, on the forefront of change, for good or for ill. I am the one by which the story will be cast, by whom the crusade will grow or shrink, or win or die. 

Or maybe, finally… maybe it’s nothing.

But of course it isn’t nothing. Something has shifted, something has changed. I fear for the worst.
0
I stand in a room. A very basic, musty listening post. Filing boxes occupy most of the wall. Nobody would have ever parsed through the records in their real form, up above. Nor would anybody deal with them down here. But still they sit there, moldering, casting sweet smelling dust into the air. It is quaint. It is safe. It was meant to be as such. 

It is a room that was loved and despised, but, more frequently than not, forgotten. All the imprints of dust on the ground are there by the press of one shoe. One shoe and one set of claws, though I am as careful as I can be to not disturb the scene. Yes. Nothing would be disturbed. 

But what did the disturbing matter? After all, the entire edifice was a fiction. No, not a fiction, but a theater prop. Shadows on the cave wall, meant to be stared at for all eternity by that same said man with the footprints. A million of these could be flickered into existence for a million other souls, had we the dedicated staff to watch over them. The room was nothing. A construction. Bits of soulless matter.

And yet, it was everything. It was all that was left. AFter all, it was soulless. That was the problem. The resident was gone, inexplicably. Well, not entirely inexplicably. The junior asura whose essence created the torture theater had taken the sinner in question back up to the surface world when it was found he had escaped. I was unsure what to think about that. It was a prudent move, a safe one, after all. The forces of heaven had been seen mobilizing in the lower spheres, certainly. Perhaps after thousands of years they had finally learned the smallest scrap of trickery, and, had we later used the sinner’s suffering to fight hteir raids… 

No. It wasn’t them. That much was obvious. No angel cared about the dead, not beyond their prescribed duties. They were as false as the goodness they pretended to spread. Why, if souls were so precious, their power so immense, why would we have been able to secure so many of our own? Why had I, all those years ago, ever found the secret to potential doom?

They didn’t care. They had never cared. Any harm they’d ever done to us had been and would only ever be incidental, like a wheelbarrow might trample over grass in the garden. 

The light in the room was sickly. There was no lingering radiance anywhere. No sign of feathers, no stench of incense. Just moldering paper and the gentle glow of a fridge in the background. 

Yes, the asura had been a fool for letting him go. I wouldn’t reprimand them. Not physically, anyways. The stress of the situation would have been torment enough for my kindred. But they certainly wouldn’t receive any more easy duties. Discipline had to be kept. Something so drastic, so strange, so anomolous; that ought to have been reported to their seniors before any action was taken. It would have been all but a few minutes. And what did the asura fear, anyways? Death?

No, they feared doing the wrong thing. After all, it has been five hundred and seventy-two years since a single human escaped a torture theater, and that last one, one crab merchant from China, had a very good reason for vanishing; the betrayal of one of our comrades. Curse Abmentor. Damn his bones to eternally bake in the celestial suns. Who can think of the liberation of others when we must first achieve our own?

That was a different issue from the one I faced. After all, discipline had been a touchy subject ever since Abmentor, let alone Abbadon. No known greater demon was absent from their post or mission during the time in which the sinner’s theater unraveled. So what about the imps, or elementals? 

Well, that would have been all too easy to spot, after all. An elemental would have left telltale traces of their respective form all over the room, let alone the exterior. And it wasn’t like any of them would have had the power to simply unweave a greater demon’s tricks, anyways. A fire elemntal could have burned the place down, and in such a way allowed the prisoner to escape. An earth elemental could have burrowed a tunnel, etc., etc. But nothing physical happened. Such a thing was clear to my eyes, anyways. 

So, an imp. Again, they would have left something behind. Their odor, primarily. My nostrils had been scorched after so long inhaling the fumes of daylight up above, but, even still, I would not have missed an imp’s influence. Even if they had used the latent suffering energy in the vicinity ot cover up their unwashed armpits, I would have known by the irregulairty of electron movement in the region. Even such basic tricks took great toll on the suffering collected in the abyss, disrupted our progress in breaking, forever, the laws that bound us to existence. I knew the smell and taste of the breakdown of reality better than anyone. And it was not here. 

So no. No infernal magic had been practiced in the area. No physical force, no magic… it was frightening indeed. Something we didn’t know… 

And it wouldn’t have been on the human. That much was obvious. I was wrong for wanting to punish my fellow, even in the slightest. I mean, a human. If the air itself had not preserved the influence of whatever the heck it was that had operated here, then why would we ever consider that we’d smell it on a human?

I shuddered. No angels. No demons. No influence of man. What had happened here? 

I scrounged around the room some more. There was nothing of note. Everything was as it was supposed to be. The fridge was stocked full of sandwich meat. The adjoining closet that shifted from place to place was full of biological copies of the sinner, replete with memories and everything, simply waiting for a newly arrived soul to take over the husk and do their part, no matter how brief. It was an ingenious idea, making the souls of sinners embody others so that they’d do a bit of their punishment for us. I almost wished I had been the one to come up with it. 

I sniffed around the closet just to be sure. It was the thing that took the most magic, anyway. And, sure enough, I detected nothing out of the ordinary. All the strands of power were still in place. They simply waited, like the husks they were attached to, for a puppeteer to pluck their strings. 

Yes, the asura. The old puppeteer. A loyal, if sluggish, servant of the Void. I could smell their talons all over the strands of power. They were perfeclty aligned. That wasn’t all too surprising; tormentor training had gotten a lot more sophisticated and rigorous than when I was in the business. Why, the power was so accessible that even a being such as myself, who had allowed my knowledge of such forces to atrophy and wither away, why, I could pluck those strings, too. 

But I couldn’t. That would be influencing the situation in a way that might disturb the investigation. 

That was a ridiculous thought. I was the investigation. Another would not be coming after me. If one did, it would be by one of Satan’s lackies, for they were the ones to mind most of the bureaucracy, anyways. You couldn’t trust those worms as far as you could throw them. Scratch that. I could throw many of them very far, if they were stupid enough to get close to me. 

Yes, you couldn’t trsut them as far as a human could throw them. That was a better analogy. Like Mr. Twirly Mustache himself, they’d been exhibiting an unseemly interest in temporal power as of late. And with the time drawing near for the exhibition of his plan…

I was the investigation. If something was to be learned, it would be learned by me. I had an hour before the Bureau of Sinner Affairs intervened, anyways. That wasn’t enough time to rally one of my allies to the task, anyway. It was me. 

It was me, and I’d learned nothing. I had to do something. Test something. But not too much. If the one who followed me cared and put their sniffer to the air…  anything more than scraping my claws against the floor would render me suspicious.

But they were blind to magic. Most of them. If I was to do anything, to learn anything, I could still pluck the strings. 

I plucked. The first golem, the one in front, stumbled blindly out the door as they were wont to do. One sinner had been snatched out of line for their assigned torment only to be my guinea pig.

The golem would think that the room they’d clamored out of was the bathroom. They’d want a sandwich. The sandwich wouldn’t be there. They’d scramble around an office that they thought they knew only to find nothing, no evidence of the sandwich that they presumed they’d made. They’d leave, only to find the original sinner, there with their sandwich. And so the original sinner was punished by the successor, again and again and again. 

Or so it was supposed to go. Even hundreds of years later, such torture methods were experimental. The suffering they drew was sharper, cleaner. There was less mass of it, less that was useful for the greater project of Hell, but the ease by which the sharp suffering was able to be molded in the hands of the servants and defenders of the abyss, why… 

Why, it was an important part of the ecosystem. That and nothing else. When the successive sinners played their role, they were disgorged into a world that despised them, hounded them, flayed their flesh from their bones and seared their nerves, just to reform them later. The bulk of the ecosystem would always extract raw suffering first and foremost. 

And yes, the puppet did produce for us, for me, stumbling around, worried about their nonexistant lunch. It was an incredibly stupid arrangement. But it had worked. It had worked, indeed. 

But that taught me nothing. It gave me no reason why the original might escape. 

But there was something… 

Something…

I couldn’t lay my claw on it, but it was there. 

There. So close. Tantalizing. Glistening. 

The smell. It was always the smell. Sweat from the same glands. Hair product from the same dollar store. Yes, yes. We’d done a fantastic job of mimicking the sinner, over and over and over again. It was too bad we couldn’t bring the mimics up to help with our work on earth.

No, that wasn’t it. Not smell that was there in the present. Not in smell that lingered about the dusty four corners of the room. It was an older, deeper smell. That same scent which was at once tinged with traces of pure, cold void. The soul.

Delicious. Terrible. Awesome. All that, even in the measliest of people. It was no wonder we treasured them so. Even if there was no way to extract suffering from them, the sheer beauty of their existence would make us covetous. Perhaps, perhaps if I had never jumpstrated us down this path, we would have…

It was foolish to think of creating paradise down here, the worst of all places, for us, the most detestable of all beings. Foolish, and yet…

And yet it may have happened. I might have sabatagoed the possibility of progress and change for thousands of years. All for an assured way to find the easiest solution.

My zeal was flagging. Even as my chitin churned in the dim echo of sunlight far above. Yes, even as my soul bathed in pains unknowable, unimaginable even to I, the being to whom they were occurring. If possibility was truly infinite, if we were immortal, then certainly we had gone down the wrong path, hadn’t we? Hadn’t we?

I would keep those thoughts to myself. They were pointless. Weak beyond all measure. And it was not what I was. I was the leader of the zealots, after all. Those who worked most dearly for our eternal liberation. The cost had been purchased, it had been sunk. And when I felt the same argument course through the soup of my mind tomorrow, I would come to the same solution. I would stop thinking about it. 

I sat in silence. I forgot all that I felt I had to forget. I filled my heart with pure, crystalline rage against that could never have been committed. 

Yes. That was me. 

And with that, with my convictions restored (or so I would tell myself), I could return my focus to the smell.

Yes, it was odd. Bitter, rotten. Souls were pure things, at least, they were when they first arrived down in the abyss. They were only tainted with scent by their time here, or their time up above. Death cleansed them of that, and the insertion technique that we’d crafted to make sinners do our work for us was supposed to do that, too. The mimic tormentor was a freshly deceased thing, and even more so, for it was stripped of all the memories that made it heavy, that made it smell.

So I should have been smelling nothing but the ambient odor of the one soul for who the torture chamber was made.

And yet… I did not. 

I did. No, I smelled the man. The hit and run car accident. The desire to have that accursed sandwich. The appall by which the subject held themself, their own actions, the desire by which they wanted to escape or die. That was normal. That was what was supposed to be there. 

And yet, there were faint deviations in the feeling. I thought at first that they were vestigial remnants of the past souls’ lives that simply hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly enough by our magics. But that wasn’t it, either. The deviations were just that; deviations. The most subtle shifts that there could possibly be.

I plucked the strings of magic again, severing the spark just before a new sinner was called to occupy a puppet body. Yes. I hadn’t lost my touch. I never could. I was Archmoloch for a reason. Or an entire legion of reasons that expanded far beyond the squads of demons I lead. Reasons  which touched all of Hell.

Broken. The magic itself was broken. The string was beginning to sever, slowly surely. But not by our incompetence, no. But by virtue of the very power by which we derived our strength to begin with. The suffering of the man, the original, and all the sinners who had come after… they were destroying the very way by which we could accumulate more. 

Ahriman had postulated at such a possibility ages ago. Two worlds ago, in fact. And I had laughed at them. Of course that was what was happening. For such a long lived prisoner, with such a unique scheme of torment… the singularity of suffering had started here. And ended. 

The souls that were being summoned by the plucking of the string were not just other sinners, no. Well, they had been in ages past. But it was quite clear to me what the string was really doing; it beckoned forth the same soul. Perhaps they were perfect replicas of the same man from different realities, perhaps they were all just fragments of the same singular harvested man. Whatever the case, it didn’t matter. It was broken, and would be, forever. 

Disappointment boiled beneath my chitin. Of course this happened. It would happen. Ahriman was always smarter than me. If so much concentrated suffering brought about the end of order if it was concentrated in one spot, and order was the method by which we collected and orchestrated our power, why…

Why, we’d never be able to control it in swathes large enough to bring about the true end of reality. 

I was right. I had fooled us all. 

No. Nobody had been fooled. In pure annihilation we had always been meant to end. And with our end came the end of our control, too. We were to trust in Mother Void, forever and always. So I would. I always would.

But, even still, I would make sure that the report about the whole situation came from the lazy Lucifer lackey. I would have nothing to say on the matter. I never would.