1. Pulverizer


    As Serac Edin whiled away her final moments in the lowest pits of hell, she was haunted by memories of freedom.


    She knew these to be her final moments, not by the grace of some uncanny premonition, but simply because she’d been informed of the fact. For it’d been just hours earlier that Porky the Jailer, a peculiar one among his kind not only for his appetite (in that he had one at all) but also for his speech (in that it was, at least barely, intelligible to Serac’s Rakshasa ears), had looked down his pale squashed nose at her and grunted in between slurps of maggot-gruel.


    “You. Pulverizer next. You dead.”


    And so, as morning turned to afternoon and afternoon wore into evening (not that the time of day mattered all that much this far down in the depths of Naraka), Serac stared unseeingly at the leftover maggots that crawled on the flesh-paved floor of her cell. She stared while trying to reckon with the facts of her meager life and the choices—or the lack thereof—that had led her to this moment.


    The Pulverizer. That aptly named contraption of grinding gears and jagged rocks that turned solids into liquids without the aid of heat or pressure. It was the last and deadliest in a large arsenal of torture devices that lined the profane halls of the Damnatorium, reserved only for the unruliest of its inmates. No soul was known to survive the Pulverizer’s bloodthirsty embrace, and Serac was under no illusion that she’d be an exception. As Porky had put so eloquently, she dead, and very much so.


    And no wonder. For even Serac could admit to having gone a little overboard in her latest attempt to break the monotony of her existence. Who could’ve foreseen that her little prank with the Furnace would leave several Jailers burnt to crisps while also inciting a prison-wide riot—one that showed no signs of slowing even after morning had turned to afternoon and afternoon had worn into evening? Even from the dimly lit cell of her solitary confinement, she could still hear the distant wailing of her fellow inmates and the barking of Jailers trying to wrest back control.


    Yes, even Serac could admit to having gone overboard. No wonder the powers that be had deemed her unruly enough to warrant a death sentence.


    She’d already been walking on thin ice, of course. After the Iron Maiden incident from last year (she could only assume it was last year; not like she had a calendar to help her keep track) and her escape attempt the year before that. She should’ve known better than to poke the proverbial bear while the consequences of her rebellious behavior were still fresh on everyone’s mind.


    And yet, could anyone really blame her? For wanting to shake things up a little? Try as Serac might, she couldn’t recall her life before the Damnatorium. Did she even have a before? Try as she might, she could recall only the present—what she’d been experiencing for days on end and for as long as she could remember.


    The miasma of decaying flesh that yet twisted her nostrils. The unbearable heat that continually singed her cinnabar skin. Oh, and of course, the torture. Who could ever forget the torture?


    Even now, the molten onyx stump of her left horn served as a raw reminder of the previous night spent inside the Furnace (right before she managed to blow it up). The stump gave her face an embarrassingly lopsided appearance, framed as it was by the Penitent’s Circlet—a laurel of fine iron tendrils that permanently wrapped around her bumpy forehead.


    Porky’s ominous yet sparse words had held no clues as to how much time Serac had left to regrow her missing horn, which proved at the moment to be her biggest source of concern. Granted, a death-row Rakshasa’s appearance and comportment mattered as little as the time of day this far down in the depths of Naraka. Even so, couldn’t a girl be forgiven for wanting to look her best in her final moments?


    Welp. Better luck next life, I suppose.


    Because that was where all this hand-wringing was best saved for. The next life. Especially if she’d managed to score herself an upgrade over the current one. A sandy beach? A chilled mai tai to sip on? Or just a mattress that didn’t feel like the pulsing innards of a live animal?


    Serac considered herself a pragmatist. She didn’t ask for much. Literally anything would be preferable to another lifetime of this.


    But… Serac also considered herself a realist. And the reality was that, for as long as she could remember, she’d been one of thousands upon thousands of disposable souls left to rot in the bowels of the Damnatorium.


    She knew no life other than that of torture. No companion other than the dead eyes and phlegmy grunts of Porky the Jailer. So, just how was she expected to have earned the kind of Karma that could manifest a beach, a cold drink, or even an inanimate mattress?


    Forget it. I’m Anchored like all the rest of the miserable Penitents that are trapped in here. Doomed to repeat the same cycle of suffering for gods know how many more Kalpas. All to repent for some ancient crime none of us can remember…


    And yet, even as Serac Edin resigned herself to her endless Kalpas of suffering, she was haunted by the ghosts of an entirely different reality. Memories of freedom. And they were her own memories, which only made them all the more painful to recall. All the more impossible to resist their call—and to quench the flames of rebellion they lit within her soul.


    A lush mountain teeming with all manner of fruits and wildlife. Cloudless skies that stretched as far and wide as the eye could see. And best (worst) of all, power.


    Power to topple a mountain with the snap of a finger. To cross a thousand skies in the blink of an eye. The kind of power that granted its wielder true and absolute freedom, unbeholden to the forces and laws of the universe, or to the whims of enemies big or small, mortal or divine, in this life or the—


    “You. Pulverizer. Now.”


    Porky’s phlegmy grunt, along with the squelching of his heavy iron boots against the prison’s fleshy floor, snapped Serac out of her recollections.


    She eyed the Jailer and his rotund yet towering frame before settling her gaze on his squished and pustule-ridden face. His must be the ugliest mug this side of the Sanzu River, and Serac was strangely confident in her assessment despite her limited knowledge of the other mugs in contention.


    She smirked at her own private joke at Porky’s expense. As it turned out, neither her solitary confinement nor her impending execution had done enough to dampen her rebellious mood.


    “You mind if I sit this one out, chief?” Her voice was more than a little hoarse, understandably so, given its lengthy neglect of producing anything other than screams of pain. “It’s just that it’s getting a bit late in the day, and I think I’d like my beauty sleep now. This figure doesn’t keep itself, you know!”


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    As Serac said this, her stump of a left horn stung under the constant pressure from her Circlet. Her skin, even redder than usual, swelled and cracked all over with blisters both fresh and unremitting. And her emaciated body trembled at the slightest provocation from the foul air that swirled all around, made flimsy and brittle after untold years of torture.


    The irony wasn’t lost on her. If anything, the irony only widened her smile.


    Porky, evidently, wasn’t in on the joke. Or if he was, he didn’t find it very funny. He gaped a while in silence before reaching an enormous, pudgy hand for the six-shooter that was chained to his belt. The metal chain clinked and jangled—rather pleasantly, Serac mused—as the Jailer raised and aimed his weapon.


    Serac stared unflinchingly at the six-shooter and its slightly rusted barrel… and laughed. Goading a cruel and short-tempered Jailer into violence was the farthest thing from pragmatism or realism, yet in the moment, it felt good to laugh. To use that bubbly voice of hers to produce something other than screams of pain.


    Besides… what did she have to lose at this point? What had she ever had to lose?


    “Really?” she spat with unchecked glee. “You think that’s going to scare me? After all the shit you’d wrung me through, you think a little handgun is gonna put the fear of Devas in me? Oh no, anything but that! Throw me back in the Furnace, hang me from the Gallows, rake me over the Bed of Thorns, but please, not the wee lead pellets from your precious—ow!”


    The pain was back in an instant and with a vengeance. It’d been delivered, not in the form of lead pellets shot out of Porky’s six-shooter, but via the thin iron tendrils that wrapped around the forehead of every inmate of the Damnatorium, including Serac’s.


    The Penitent’s Circlet—inextricably fused with the wearer’s skin, flesh, and bone—now tightened. Only slightly, but that slight increase in pressure was enough to cause an excruciating headache that inflamed Serac’s entire being. And that excruciating pain was enough to wipe clean the last shred of her delusions about freedom.


    “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Alright, enough! You’ve made your point!”


    Porky lowered and reholstered his weapon—his cattle prod—at the same time as Serac’s headache subsided. And as her senses and thoughts returned to her, she inwardly chided herself for her own indiscretion. It’d been ages since she’d personally pissed off Porky enough to make him invoke the Circlet, perhaps long enough for her to have forgotten the absolute power it had over her. She’d do well not to forget again.


    Not that it mattered at this point. Not when her next destination was—


    “Pulverizer. Now.”


    Porky’s gnarly muscles bulged as he pulled apart the giant rib cage that served as the ‘door’ to Serac’s cell. Outside, the Rakshasa inmate was greeted by fresh currents of stagnant air as well as a buzzing undercurrent beneath the commotions of a prison in riot. This buzzing sound was made up of the whimpered lamentations of Penitents everywhere: a constant reminder of the absolute power their Jailers held over them—and of the return to miserable normalcy that surely awaited their misguided uprising.


    Gone entirely was Serac’s earlier bravado, replaced by meek self-loathing. She embodied this by lowering her head and averting her gaze from the other cells as she passed. For to look upon the cells’ occupants would be to see reflections of her own wretched self.


    Eventually, Porky led her through a tricuspid valve and into a darkened offshoot of the main corridor. The floor sagged under the weight of her bare feet and emanated an unpleasant sort of lukewarmness—the kind that might be felt from over-tenderized meat.


    Here, for the first time, the scent of blood overrode that of flesh. Serac instantly knew what that meant, even as her fearful eyes took in the full extent of the horrors that awaited her.


    The Pulverizer was larger and even more terrible than she could’ve imagined. For she soon realized that she was already inside it. This entire, roughly ovoid room was the Pulverizer, with every inch of its ceilings and walls covered with blocks of craggy stone and the rusted mechanisms that jutted in between them.


    Not only that, but the entire room was also red. Red with layers upon layers of the blood of its former victims. Pain and death, both fresh and unremitting.


    Then, even as Serac stood frozen in shock, the Pulverizer shrieked with a high-pitched metallic keening. It began to compress, with its ceilings and walls of pain and death closing in on the latest of solid beings to be turned liquid.


    Suddenly and absolutely, even Serac’s self-loathing made way for an emotion that was more primitive, both in source and urgency. Fear. Gripped by a primal fear that overrode even that of her Circlet, she turned toward her Jailer, ready to plead and grovel and offer anything and everything of her meager self in exchange for clemency.


    But Porky was nowhere to be seen. He’d already stepped out of the room, with the tricuspid valve shuttering behind him.


    No, not all of him. A length of metal chain yet poked out of the opening between the three flaps of the valve. It was the chain that tethered a Jailer’s six-shooter to his belt—a reminder that, here in the lowest depths of Naraka, every soul was bound inexorably to the sins of their former lives.


    Serac lunged and reached. Her right hand managed to grab hold of the chain. At the same time, however, her entire world was thrown into blinding redness as the Pulverizer completed its first bite. Crunch! Skreeee…


    “Arrggghhhh…!!”


    A familiar refrain. Her once bubbly voice wrung and twisted until it burst out as an animalistic scream. But Serac couldn’t pay her throat any heed. Not when her whole body had turned to a mangled pulp within the Pulverizer’s rattling maw.


    Her whole body… except for her right hand! Somehow, the right hand remained wrapped around Porky’s chain. It stayed there even as the chain tautened, tugged as it was from the other side of the valve—and even as the Pulverizer closed in a second time, this time gnashing its teeth in wanton hunger, relishing the liquefied contents that gushed out of its latest meal.


    A sandy beach. A chilled mai tai to sip on.


    Serac couldn’t believe the thoughts that gushed out with the soup that was now her brain matter. Couldn’t believe that she could have thoughts at all.


    The power to topple a mountain with the snap of a finger. To cross a thousand skies in the blink of an eye. To grasp freedom—in its truest and most absolute form.


    And even as her sightless eyes saw her own redness paint a new layer upon the Pulverizer’s teeth, as her voiceless throat wrung out the last and most desperate of its screams, and as her shapeless body felt the weight of a mountain grind against its back… Serac Edin somehow found the strength to hold onto the chain in her right hand.


    It was the chain that tethered a Jailer’s six-shooter to his belt—just as surely as it Anchored a Wayfaring soul to the truth and sanctity of her Path.


    Even as the rest of her body and mind turned to mush, Serac felt something solid fall into her right hand, taking the place of Porky’s chain. Something with real heft. Something that promised freedom—and the violence with which to win it.


    And that was when Serac’s soundless ears perked up at a message from nowhere.


    “Deific transmutation complete. Instrument re-designated as: REVOLVER. Candidate identified. Initiate pairing. Pairing complete.”


    The vaguely male voice was cool, collected, and detached—almost infuriatingly so, given Serac’s predicament. But precisely because she was in such a bind, she listened with all her might to the message from nowhere—to the guidance from her faceless savior.


    “Welcome, Wayfarer, to the beginning of the rest of your afterlife.”