There is a Hell, Believe me, I've seen it.

Living in Hell wasn’t so bad. In fact, living in Hell was actually pretty awesome. Of course it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Following all of the Satanic rules can be kind of a bummer. I mean, rules are for schmucks, right? I really can’t complain though, it mostly smells like roses and fresh air. Far better than smelling sulfur all day. It’s not perfect, but I’ll take this over Heaven any day. 

Picturing Hell is often rendered as an image of torture and destruction. There’s an over crowded, flaming pit filled with souls. Demons run amuck. They torture souls while trying to kill each other. Satan is some weird half man, half goat thing. Usually, he’s muscular and beat red. He has those goat horns on the top of his head and cloven feet. He wears a loin cloth and nothing else. Then there’s that god awful goatee. Logic would tell anyone that a half man, half animal thing would clearly take the time out of his day to make poor facial hair grooming choices. After all, Satan is one classy m**********r. While I would actually love for the ruler of Hell to look like that, he doesn’t. Satan wears an Armani suit and expensive Italian shoes. He smells like Versace and after shave. A real high class individual. He does have a goatee though. I guess that’s a small win.  

The real version of Hell? Well, it’s the prom queen’s end of the school year house party at her parents million dollar mansion. Everyone’s friends are there and they have the best drugs sinful souls can buy. It’s invitation only though. Only the worst sinners will be accepted here. Breaking any rules in Leviticus will extend any person a golden ticket straight to Hell. Mixing different fabrics, eating shellfish, and sowing different crops side by side. The works. 

I realize this all sounds like a bunch of temptation to corrupt pure souls and lead them down the path of sin. The path that rocks, really. It kind of is. Who wants to be clean and pure anyways? I’m only conveying truth. The real truth. The truth God would never want you to hear.

Heaven isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I wouldn’t know personally, but from the souls that have periodically fallen, I have a good idea. Heaven is supposed to be paradise. This magical place with rainbows and unicorns and is like super clean. I hear that the clouds shine like polished marble and it smells like fresh linen. Cleanliness is next to holiness after all. However, as I understand it, it’s basically an eternity of church. All the souls do all day long is worship God. Since they’re souls they don’t need food or water or bathroom breaks. They can just keep singing and praying, forever long. Personally, I’m not about that life. Although my fate was written in stone when I was one and I didn’t really have that choice to make. 

When I was one the Rapture occurred. Well, the beginning of the Rapture. It was 3:00 AM, the witching hour, when all the souls who were pure enough went to Heaven. There were cars left on the highways and some even crashed into various buildings. Some ran off bridges. Almost half the world’s population disappeared. By 6:00 AM, when most people had realized what happened, there was mass hysteria. People raided the streets and began looking for their people. Just picture people screaming at the top of their lungs like their loved ones would just appear after hearing their name screamed a million times. Idiots. I can only imagine how stupid they all looked. That’s when God, announced he would save more souls if they repented, and so they did.

The rest of us were left here on Earth to fend for ourselves. It was said that Satan himself should rise and release a beast by unlocking the seven seals. According to the book of Revelations anyways. It would unleash earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanos. Essentially the Earth should’ve imploded. Then Satan was supposed to take all the corrupt souls to their endless torture in the pit. It would reek of sulfur and we’d all be locked in tiny jail cells that lie in the middle of funnel cloud that never ends. The latter part never happened though.  

It turns out there are four crowned princes of Hell: Satan, Lucifer, Belial, and Leviathan. No, Satan and Lucifer are not the same person. A common misconception, both fallen archangels though. All four agreed that Earth was far too precious to destroy. They took pity on us. They turned Earth into the new Hell where they were in charge and demons basically run everything. From universities to positions in government. It sounds like Earth should have went to s**t at this point, but it’s a place of opportunity and freedom. Poverty isn’t even a thing anymore and no one goes hungry. The worst fear is pissing off the princes or college professors and getting tossed into the pit. 

The pit is in fact an endless vortex. A funnel cloud that houses jail cells. It sits in the middle of an acidic lake. The pit is where especially gnarly demons with a taste for flesh torture condemned souls. The pit usually houses pedophiles, psychotic killers, you know, the scum of the Earth. Sometimes, though, a college professor can take failing their class personally and a student may end up in there for the duration of their summer. I have yet to see the pit and I certainly don’t plan too. Sounds like a bummer.

I still don’t know why I wasn’t saved. The question often plagues me from time to time. I suspect it’s because my parents didn’t baptize me, but since I don’t remember anything about them or their religious choices the point is moot. I wasn’t saved and I was left here all alone and to fend for myself. 

That is until a greater demon found me. Lilith. She had a soft spot for children. She is the mother of all demons after all. Most people know her as Adam’s first wife. She was and she did refuse to lay beneath Adam. I think Adam sounds like a little b***h, but that may just be my biased opinion. Lilith ran from Adam and she discovered an archangel named Samuel. Samuel was the archangel of death and destruction, he was sent by God to kill Lilith. Instead though they fell in love. Remember Satan? Yeah, well, formally named Samuel before being kicked out of Heaven by God. Together, they birthed the race of demons. 

They really are the ultimate power couple. I could only ever hope to achieve a love like theirs. Full of lust, sex, and power. I’m literally kidding. I tried that whole “love” thing and to be honest it’s a lot of work. Like who honestly wants to worry about fulfilling another person’s desires, on top of your own, while also exuberayting power? Not me. 

Anyways, she raised me until I was a teenager and then left me into the very caring hands (I am saying this with intense sarcasm) of Bart. Full name Bartholomew. Former apostle of Jesus, fallen from Heaven, and turned demon. He’s mostly an idiot. I’m realistically the adult in our relationship. He’s an over grown man child that refuses to change his ways. We’ve never been apart. To be honest, I could never picture a life without him. Basically, I’m stuck with his annoying a*s for eternity. My personal torture for being damned, I guess. 

 

We live in new Hell together. College graduates wasting our educated minds. I engineer weapons for the princes of Hell. Bart does whatever the hell Bart does. No one honestly knows. We party. We drink. We essentially do whatever is in our best self interest and there’s not a force alive that can stop us. Well, at least nothing that we know about. 

Author's Note

This is technically a prologue, but I am going to axe it. I wanted a solid foundation for my writing, so this is clearly an information dump. I am more interested in everyone's interest in the novel.