PROLOGUE: DEATH #3
Chapter 1
Ruby woke up drowning.
Not in water—not in anything that wanted to cradle or refresh. She woke up drowning in screaming.
The River Styx wasn't a river. It was a living paste of compressed agony, thick as tar and twice as hungry. Every soul that had ever drowned since the Beginning of Time had been rendered down into this viscous nightmare, and now it clung to Ruby like it recognized her.
Thousands of cold hands grabbed her ankles. Her wrists. Her throat.
She kicked. Something bit her calf—teeth or memory, she couldn't tell. Something else hissed her name in seven distinct, overlapping voices, each one slightly off-pitch.
Her head broke the surface for one precious second.
Long enough to hear a voice—exhausted, familiar, and deeply annoyed—shout from the bone-white shore:
"OH FOR THE LOVE OF—NOT AGAIN!"
Then she went under.
Ruby clawed upward with everything she had. Her fingers finally scraped against the riverbank, and she hauled herself onto a shore made of ground bones, smooth and warm like polished ivory.
She collapsed on her knees, coughing up thick black sludge. It sizzled when it hit the ground, smelling of sulfur and rusted iron.
The sky above her was the color of a fresh bruise—purple, black, streaked with lightning that never actually struck anything. Faces moved inside the clouds, opening toothless mouths in silent, eternal screams.
A clipboard slapped down beside her.
Hard.
Demanding.
Gary stood over her, looking like he'd aged a hundred years in the last ten minutes. He wore his usual short-sleeved button-up, clip-on tie, and an expression of existential exhaustion perfected over six centuries of Hell's customer service.
His burnt-orange skin cracked when he frowned.
He frowned constantly.
He didn't offer her a hand. He never did. He was Hell's Support Staff, not a bloody angel.
"Ruby," Gary said, his voice flat as a corpse. "This is the third time this month."
Ruby spat more sludge onto the bone shore. Her large, bright eyes—like ruby candies framed by thick lashes—stared up at Gary without a trace of remorse.
"Hi, Gary," she said sweetly. "Coffee?"
"This is Hell, Ruby. No amount of coffee can handle this."
Gary sighed—a breath that weighed as much as the fall of a civilization. He flipped through his clipboard, each page rustling like dying leaves.
"Listen to me carefully," he said. "I've processed millions of souls over millennia. They die. They come here. That's the First Death. They never come back."
He shook his clipboard at her, pointing to the entries with a trembling finger.
"Three times. You died, and Hell spat you back up. Do you understand what that means? That's a miracle. A cosmic chance of grace. It's an opportunity for redemption, to earn Heaven. A chance to start over."
Gary's voice dropped to a hollow whisper.
"I've never seen it. Nobody has. Being ejected from Hell is divine intervention. And the ones who get that mercy?" He shook his head slowly. "They run to the nearest church. They hug monks. They dedicate their lives to charity. They do anything to stay away from here."
He pointed at Ruby, his withered finger trembling with barely contained frustration.
"But you? You return to the rooftop. You return to the rope. You return to the livestream. You actively try to get back here. You are phenomenally good at suicide, Ruby."
Ruby merely tilted her head, her sweet, guileless smile contrasting sharply with the hellscape around them. Her full, red lips looked too vibrant for this place.
"Well," she said in that cute voice that was horribly misplaced, "I missed Daddy."
Gary closed his eyes. He massaged his temples so hard that small flecks of ash dusted off his cracked skin.
"I'm going to ignore that," he muttered. "Cause of death?"
"Jumped off a building," Ruby replied, wringing Styx water from her hair. "I livestreamed it. Very tasteful lighting. Good angle. The followers said they loved the 'falling-from-perfection' aesthetic."
Gary's pen hovered over his clipboard.
"Last words?"
Ruby grinned, manic and proud. Her candy-like eyes shone with pure mischief.
"'See you soon, Daddy!'"
Gary's pen snapped in half.
He took a slow, deep breath—the kind someone takes before resigning themselves to fate. His spectacles fogged.
This was his breaking point.
"He's going to incinerate you," Gary muttered.
"Hot."
Gary pulled out Ruby's punch card. It said FREQUENT DIER – BUY 9, GET 1 FREE in cheerful red font. He punched it with a hole shaped like a tiny flame.
"One more and you get a free lava latte," Gary said mechanically.
Ruby perked up. "Do I get marshmallows this time?"
"No."
"Cinnamon?"
"No."
"Then why would I—"
"Ruby." Gary pinched the bridge of his nose. "Please. For once in your short, chaotic existence, do NOT make this harder."
She sat cross-legged on the bones, wringing out her hair—dark at the tips and starting to streak white from the stress Hell kept gifting her.
"Well?" she asked brightly. "Can I see him?"
Gary flipped a page on his clipboard. He looked like he'd aged ten years in three seconds.
"He's in a meeting with the Sins," he said carefully. "They're discussing your... TikTok account."
Ruby lit up like a firecracker. "It finally blew up?!"
"It didn't blow up," Gary corrected. "It melted the servers. Twice. Mammon had a panic attack. Pride is still screaming about copyright infringement. Sloth fell asleep in the middle of the outrage. And Lucifer is—"
CRACK.
The ground split beneath them.
A deep, earth-shaking roar echoed through all Nine Circles at once, rattling the bones beneath their feet.
Chapter 2
Ruby's hair stood on end.
She simply smiled.
Gary squeaked like a dying mouse.
Then—
LUCIFER'S VOICE rolled through the air like thunder wearing expensive cologne. The sound was destruction draped in velvet, beauty wrapped around annihilation.
"BRING. HER. TO. THE. THRONE. ROOM."
The River Styx bubbled violently. Sulfur geysers exploded behind them. The sky flickered. A dozen tortured faces in the clouds turned toward Ruby as if they were watching a disaster movie in real time.
Ruby hopped to her feet, dusting herself off.
Amidst the chaos, she looked like an ordinary human girl—cute, witty, and brave. A rare gem in the mortal realm, let alone Hell. She had wide, beautiful candy eyes, a porcelain doll face, and a courage that bordered on pure insanity.
"Well," she said, beaming, "at least he still wants to see me."
Gary stared at her, hollow and afraid.
"No," he whispered, clutching his clipboard like a life preserver. "He wants to kill you."
Ruby shrugged, her attitude one of total acceptance.
This was the most unsettling aspect for Gary.
He had seen millions of souls. They all fought. They all struggled. They all begged, cried, or cursed.
Ruby?
She just smiled.
She seemed fused with Hell. She appeared to welcome every torment without resistance, without self-defense.
This brought Gary back to the old legends, the whispers only uttered in the darkest corners of the Infernal Archives:
Hellborn.
Hellborn.
Neither Demon nor mere Human. One whose soul, whether due to the brutality of life or a cosmic flaw, found its true home in Hell. One who accepted fire as a blanket and suffering as a lullaby.
Legend had it that only a soul so fundamentally accepting of Hell's darkness—one who instinctively refused to fight the torment—would be spat back up, only so Hell could enjoy their repeated, eternal struggle to return.
Ruby was this anomaly.
She was the first modern Hellborn—a bitter joke played on Heaven itself.
"Even better," Ruby replied cheerfully.
And grinning like a cute gremlin, she followed the glowing cracks toward Pandemonium.
Hell groaned.
The Morningstar waited.
And Ruby skipped.
INTERLUDE: CIRCLE 7 – VIOLENCE WING, THE BLOOD RIVER TORTURE DEPARTMENT, MIDSHIFT
The blood river gurgled like a clogged drain, thick and bubbling with the consistency of hot tar. Souls writhed beneath the surface, arms flailing desperately, trying to grab anything solid.
No one was actively drowning them.
Because the demons assigned to the task were standing around gossiping.
Kragith leaned on his trident—all eight feet of horned muscle and bad decisions. "I'm telling you, what if she's his type?"
Vexa hissed, her forked tongue catching a clot of dried blood in the air. Her scales didn't sit right on her face—like someone had applied reptile-print makeup with a sandblaster.
"Lucifer doesn't have a type," she said. "He hasn't slept with anything since the Fall."
Kragith shrugged, his massive shoulders rippling. "Maybe that's why she's interesting. She's broken. He loves broken things."
Thalgrim shifted uncomfortably. He was still new—only three hundred years dead—so much of his human face remained. His eyes still held the kind of moral discomfort that didn't last long in Hell.
"You're telling me," Thalgrim said slowly, "we're delaying torture because we're discussing Lucifer's potential sex life?"
Kragith jabbed him gently with the trident. "You're young. You don't understand. Nothing ever happens in Hell. Torture is boring. The screaming? The begging? The writhing? It's the same playlist every single day. But this—" He pointed upward, toward Lucifer's tower. "—this is drama."
Vexa nodded enthusiastically. "The big man's pacing. His aura's glitching. Belial looks like he's shedding a whole decade off his lifespan every ten minutes. Something's up."
Thalgrim frowned. "And we think the reason is... a dead girl making viral videos?"
Kragith grinned, revealing teeth like crushed pearls. "This is Hell, kid. Reputational damage is worse than any sin. Think of the metrics."
Before Thalgrim could answer, the supervisor arrived—Agares, who looked like a crocodile skull wearing a cheap work shirt. His tail flicked like a boss who already regretted coming over.
Agares surveyed the river, then the three demons, then the river again. His eye sockets narrowed.
"Why," he said quietly, dangerously, "are there forty-seven souls still conscious in the river?"
Vexa straightened. "We were just—"
"I don't care." Agares pointed a bony claw at the souls thrashing around like desperate spaghetti. "Drown them. Now. Or I reassign all three of you to Circle Three."
Kragith paled. "Circle Three... the maggot shoveling?"
Agares clicked his teeth—a sound like dry bone breaking. "Try me."
The demons scrambled—literally scrambled—back to work. The river erupted with screaming again as they shoved souls under one by one, complaining the whole time.
Agares watched them go, tail twitching irritably.
He waited until they were out of earshot.
Then muttered to himself, his voice dry as ancient parchment:
"...I bet he hooks up with her though. She's pretty hot."
He scratched his crocodile-snouted chin thoughtfully.
"Fifty souls says by Arc Three."
He made a mental note to start a betting pool.
Hell was boring.
This was better than cable.
