The Sands of Judgment
Lucien Virelli blinked. Once. Twice.The third blink never came—because the reality around him refused to change.
Hell.The word didn't roar in his ears. It didn't scream, didn't shout.It settled.Heavy. Silent. Absolute.Like a judge's gavel striking the marrow of his soul.
He stood, trembling, on a field of pale white sand that shimmered like powdered bone, each grain sharp enough to cut skin. The dunes rose and fell like the breath of some slumbering giant, stretching endlessly across a horizon that offered no mercy. And above—above was the sky of damnation.
The heavens had been bled dry, painted in hues of molten crimson. Clouds as black as pitch churned and twisted like ruptured veins, streaking across the sky in unnatural patterns. They pulsed—yes, pulsed, like they were alive. Diseased. Hungry.
The wind came not with song, but with silence and suffering. It was a hollow heat, whispering across the wasteland like the breath of a dying god, searing the skin without flame. Every gust carried the distant echo of screams, long faded, long forgotten, like a choir of agony swallowed by eternity.
And beneath his boots, the sand shifted. Moved.
Not with wind.
But with bodies.
All around him, people clawed their way from the earth. Some gasped for breath that wouldn't come. Others screamed, their eyes wide and wild, as if waking from a dream straight into a nightmare. Hands broke through the sand like weeds in a cursed garden—bleeding, trembling, grasping at a sky that offered no solace.
Lucien didn't scream.But his breath caught.
One man staggered from a dune, skin flayed and glistening, sobbing prayers through shredded lips. "Please—no—no, I was good—I repented, I repented!"
A woman fell to her knees, clawing at her chest like she could rip her sins out and hold them aloft as penance. "God, I'm sorry! Give me another chance! I didn't mean it, I swear, I didn't—"
Another soul, a boy barely eighteen, curled into a fetal position, rocking back and forth in the sand. He didn't cry. He just whispered over and over, "This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real..."
Lucien stood at the eye of the storm—silent, observant. Internally, the quake began to rise: a subtle thrum of dread in his chest. Not panic. No, not yet. But awareness. The cold, sharp blade of understanding sliding between his ribs.
He was here. Not in court. Not in a cell. Not asleep.Dead.And this… this was his sentence.
But unlike the others, who fell into despair, Lucien's mind clicked into motion.
"Think," he muttered to himself, voice raspy with the dry heat. "Think, damn you."
The lawyer in him stirred. Even here, especially here, the gears of calculation never stopped turning.How do you appeal a cosmic judgment?How do you lie your way out of eternal damnation?
He looked around. Broken people. Lost souls.He wasn't just surrounded by the damned—he was surrounded by opportunity.
"If Hell is a system," he murmured to himself, "then there are rules. If there are rules, there are loopholes. And if there are loopholes…"His lips curved into a dry smile."…then there's room for a good lawyer."
Lucien Virelli, the man who twisted truth and bent justice into a blade, had one thought.
How do I make Hell work for me?
And just like that, his fire ignited—not from the heat, but from ambition.
The game wasn't over.Hell had just begun.
The Blood-Slick Gospel
The screams had begun to blur together—anguish, disbelief, rage. A symphony of the damned, each voice clawing to be heard over the next. Souls clawed their way out from the shimmering dunes like corpses from a sea of bone dust, their skin ashen, their eyes wide with the raw sting of eternal truth. This wasn't a dream. This wasn't metaphor. This was Hell.
Lucien stood silent, chin high, while the newly dead wept and wailed around him. His sharp, calculating eyes sliced through the chaos like a scalpel. A young woman collapsed beside him, sobbing into her hands. A businessman in a scorched suit shouted for his lawyer—amusing, Lucien thought, since he was likely his lawyer. A teenager screamed for her mother. An old man staggered toward the red horizon as though he could outrun damnation.
Then came the priest.
Clad in torn black robes and a crooked white collar stained by sand and sin, the man raised both hands into the blistering wind. His voice rang out—not trembling with fear like the others, but booming with conviction.
"Listen to me! There is a way out of this place!" he cried, his voice echoing unnaturally loud across the barren expanse.
A hush, jagged and unnatural, fell over the crowd.
"If we pray together—if we believe—we can be redeemed. We can return to the light! Salvation is not lost!" His voice broke slightly, but the drama of it only added to the illusion. "We must unite! We must repent!"
Hope. The desperate, fragile seed of it bloomed across the faces of the damned like a disease. People staggered toward him, some crawling, some weeping, some whispering words they hadn't spoken in decades—"God," "forgive," "save me."
Lucien's lip curled in the faintest smirk.
He's good, he thought, crossing his arms. But not good enough to fool me.
This priest—this self-proclaimed shepherd of salvation—was one of them. A liar. A manipulator. A predator wrapped in faith's trappings. Lucien saw the gleam in his eyes, the practiced performance in his trembling voice. He wasn't trying to save these souls. He was preparing to use them.
Canon fodder in the name of the Father. How poetic.
Lucien almost clapped. Instead, he took a step forward, intent on introducing himself—offering a proposition. The priest was a snake, but Lucien was venom incarnate. Together, they could slither far.
But fate had no patience for alliances.
The ground beneath their feet shivered.
A tremor. A hush.
Then the white sand exploded upward, as though the earth itself vomited death.
From beneath, it came.
A beast of unspeakable length, coiled and muscled like a mountain serpent—its body glistening with pus and bile. Its face was a grotesque bloom of rotating, layered jaws, each rimmed with teeth finer than razors and dripping with rot.
It moved like hunger given flesh.
The man standing beside Lucien—a lean fellow with eyes still wide from hope—had no time to run. The worm's jaws clamped down, ripping the man in half with a sickening squelch. Blood sprayed across the dunes like a broken fountain. The crowd screamed in a single, unified chord of terror.
Lucien didn't scream. He didn't move. He stared.
The beast reared back, face coated in gore, and loosed a shriek that rattled the sand. Not a roar. A warning.
Run.
The congregation of damned souls shattered. They scattered like ants, tripping over each other in the white dunes, trampling hope beneath blood-slick feet.
Lucien watched, fascinated.
The priest had dropped to his knees, clutching his cross like it had weight here. He muttered prayers—no longer for show, but now desperate and real.
Lucien, ever the opportunist, simply whispered, "Showtime."
This was Hell.
And Hell had rules.
All he had to do was learn them… and break them harder than anyone else.
Lucien Virelli was many things—a liar, a manipulator, a viper draped in velvet—but above all, he was a survivor. And right now, survival meant running like hell through Hell.
He sprinted across the white-hot sands, heart pounding like war drums in his ears, breath shallow and ragged. The others screamed around him—panicked masses of broken souls tripping over each other, scrambling for safety that didn't exist. The giant earthworm had torn through their group like a blade through parchment, swallowing one poor wretch whole with a gurgling crunch of pulverized bone and bloodied sinew. Its body—a grotesque tower of scales and writhing teeth—had erupted from the sand in a geyser of horror, but now… it was gone.
Just like that.
Lucien stopped mid-stride, boots skidding across the sand, chest heaving. It didn't make sense. The creature had been slaughtering without mercy—so why retreat?
And then he felt it.
The world stilled. Even the wind held its breath.
A shadow slithered across the dunes.
Lucien looked up—and for the first time since his death, he forgot how to breathe.
Descending from the bleeding sky was a creature that made the earthworm look like a maggot. A bird, or something that had once resembled one, but was now perverted into an apex nightmare. Its wings stretched wide, ragged and dripping with black ichor, each flap sending shockwaves through the air. It had three scaly legs, like tree trunks scorched by divine flame, and four crimson eyes split between two heads, each snapping and hissing independently. Feathers like jagged blades rustled as it hovered just above the sands.
A scream rose from the group—a raw, unfiltered wail of human dread—and that's when Lucien saw the priest.
The same man who had preached salvation minutes ago had dropped to his knees, his cross clutched tightly to his chest, face lifted in trembling prayer.
"Have mercy! Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus!" he cried, voice cracking under terror.
The creature answered with hunger.
Both heads lunged, talons the size of scythes closing around the priest. There was a wet, visceral pop—then a rip, and the man was torn in two like tissue paper. Blood sprayed the air in a macabre fountain, and the beast devoured the twitching halves without even chewing.
Lucien didn't blink.
He didn't pray.
He ran.
Terror clawed at his chest, not just from the monstrosity, but from the realization—it wasn't the only one. If such a predator existed here, what else did this damned place hold? The worm had retreated. That thing—that winged thing—was a predator of predators.
And Lucien? He was prey.
"I'm too clever to die like that," he muttered to himself, pushing his body harder, faster. "Too clever to go out on my knees."
All around him, others stumbled and fell. Screams echoed, followed by silence. But Lucien never looked back. There was no room for sympathy here. Only strategy. He would survive this hellscape not by force—but by cunning. There had to be a way to twist this to his advantage.
Maybe there were rules. Maybe there was a hierarchy. Maybe… even a courtroom.
Because if Hell had a system, even a twisted one, then surely—surely—there was a place for a devil in a suit like him.
He just had to live long enough to find it.
And so he ran, not from fear—but toward opportunity cloaked in shadow.
Smoke and Whispers
Lucien ran until the world bled.
His breath was fire in his chest, each step a hammerfall of agony through his calves and knees. The white sand clung to his legs like ash, cutting at his skin with every stride. Around him, others ran too—hollow-eyed souls, gasping, screaming, stumbling in their desperation. Their faces were masks of fear and disbelief, expressions twisted by raw terror. One man sobbed openly, mumbling prayers into the wind. A woman screamed the name of her child over and over until her voice cracked like dry wood.
And still they ran.
Behind them, the hellish bird-thing soared into the red sky once more, circling lazily like a god of death, wings spread wide and terrible. But it did not descend again. It did not pursue. It vanished beyond the horizon, a living nightmare retreating into the haze of crimson light.
Lucien didn't stop until his knees buckled.
He collapsed into the sand, panting, coughing, his chest heaving like a bellows. The sand scalded his palms, the air tore at his lungs, and his heart thundered in his ears.
Around him, others dropped too—one by one, in pairs, in heaps. They collapsed like puppets with cut strings, groaning, crying, moaning in disbelief and grief. Some still muttered to themselves. Others simply lay flat on the sand, eyes wide, staring up at the swirling nightmare sky.
And then… silence.
Not peace.
Just the absence of immediate death.
Lucien looked back, his eyes scanning the horizon. The sand stretched endlessly, rippling under the blistering wind. No sign of the bird. No sign of the worm. Just emptiness.
He exhaled, a slow, shaking breath that tasted like smoke and salt.
Safe. For now.
His mind, however, did not rest.
He sat up slowly, his suit scorched and shredded, his hands trembling but eyes sharp. He scanned the crowd around him—if it could even be called a crowd. Maybe thirty people remained from the initial swarm. The rest were lost. Consumed. Trampled. Or scattered into the dunes, never to be seen again.
Pathetic, Lucien thought. Absolutely pathetic.
He watched them—the way they cried, clutched each other, muttered apologies to gods who no longer answered. Their faces were smeared with blood and sand and hopelessness. Some hugged strangers, some laughed hysterically, and one man just dug into the sand with his bare hands, muttering, "This is just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream."
Useless.
Every last one of them.
Lucien's lip curled slightly. These were not comrades. They were ballast. Meat. Dead weight. Yet in Hell, even ballast had value—if you knew how to shift it.
He thought of the priest—now nothing but viscera in a beast's gut. The man had almost played them all, playing preacher with the soul of a parasite. That kind of man would have done well back on Earth. Would've made a fine co-conspirator.
But now?
Gone.
"Too slow," Lucien muttered to himself. "Too loud. Too… righteous."
He couldn't make that mistake.
He stared out at the horizon, the dunes rolling like frozen waves under the ever-bleeding sky. Magma lakes bubbled in the distance, and in the air hung the scent of rot, smoke, and sulfur. A heat haze blurred the world at the edges, making the shapes of the damned shimmer like ghosts.
Then, his thoughts turned inward.
This place was chaos incarnate. No rules. No structure. No law. That made it a nightmare for most.
But for Lucien?
It was an opportunity.
Here, the old world's truths still whispered beneath the screaming winds. The strong ruled the weak. Power mattered more than principle. And influence—manipulation—was currency more valuable than gold.
And Lucien Virelli?
He was rich.
He rubbed the dried blood from his side and chuckled softly. Not because anything was funny—but because he was still alive. Because he had seen monsters and survived. Because his brain still worked.
Because while everyone else saw damnation, Lucien saw potential.
He could work with this.