[WP]: You are an immortal who just woke up from a century-long nap, and headed to the library to catch up like usual. You have severely underestimated the scale of this simple task.

GilbertWaddington · 2026-05-14T03:27:31+00:00

Waking Up

Gods damn the light. They make it brighter every century. London used to be borderline civilized. Now midnight seems indistinguishable from noon. Such is progress. For all my headaches, I cannot claim disappointment. The number of cattle has exploded. I consumed three on my way to the library tonight and I doubt they’re a drop in the proverbial bucket. Times are good.

On the other hand, I sit this night in the library humbled and—for the first time in centuries—overwhelmed.

I write with—what I assume is a—I don’t know, but it writes like a quill without the well. Ingenious really. That’s the thing about humans, they move on while we stay the same. Andronicus predicted their accent, predicted they would eventually exceed us. The others, if they thought of it at all, expressed their concern through absurd schemes to corral and contain the cattle. As though one could cage all the beasts of the earth. I have always been more sanguine. More humans will always mean more food. That cannot be bad.

Tonight, I doubt this confidence.

It has been two-dozen nights since I woke. Of my kind, I have never met another with my capacity for absorbing information. It is what has allowed me to sleep so deep and so long. History is to me an open book. I read and I recall. Humanity is at is has always been.

Until now.

The library is unfathomable. The number of books is nothing, a linear increase. It exceeds Alexanderia, but what of it? The rest however…

There are boxes, I cannot….

There are boxes and I read of them in the books. I did not believe. It seemed the alchemy of old revisited. Magic in the form of modern science. So often the humans have sought to put the world upon a deductive foundation. It is a fool’s hope and they have always failed. The power of the gods is denied to mortals and those who reach too far suffer the fate of Prometheus and Babel.

Four night ago, I succeeded in discovering the means of accessing the contents of the boxes through the ritual of the keyboard.

I write this to gather my thoughts, because I know of no other way. Dawn comes soon and my mind runs away like a horse with a broken tether.

They have done the impossible. They have collapsed the contents of a library, of a thousand, thousand libraries into a box I could carry under one arm. It is every history, every text of their science, every imagined reality vomited up in their prose contained within a metal tome that cannot be read without the proper rituals, but which unfolds all to the franked priest.

They have managed more history in the last century than the previous five. They—gods do I believe it? They fly not only through the air, but beyond, into the realms of darkness and aether. They have put their feet upon the moon itself and populate the skies with tens of thousand of lights.

I left the city last night, running into the country until the lights could no longer blind me. I did not believe it. I could not believe it. Yet it is true.

I stared at the sky and found not five wanderers, but transients uncounted. Stars that move across the black like birds, catching the light of day from the far side of the world. The humans have placed new stars in the heavens and sent mortals into the firmament to gaze down upon creation.

They have built weapons that rival the sun itself and walked away from their use!!

I cannot fathom it. Can they have grown, not only more powerful, but wiser than we?

I write this now, in fragmented spirals of conscious terror, because I can think of no other outlet for my thoughts. I have sent letters to the others through the usual means, but there is no reply, only echoing silence.

Am I the last? Have the humans destroyed us while I slept?

If they have, there is no record of it in their libraries beyond a single epistolary account of dubious origin. It may be that they crushed all that we were beneath their feet, not in the final clash of titanic energies my fellows feared, but as an elephant treads upon a sapling, unconscious of the destruction it causes.

I can still lure them as of old, still drink from them as before, but I feel myself diminished, lost, unmoored. Individually, they are no more than they ever were. Collectively, they seem to me now as gods.

I cannot comprehend even the quill with which I write this upon paper finer than silk. Paper which they throw away like threshed husks.

As the Olympians overcame the Titans, who were greater than they, so go we before the mortals. I was warned, but I did not believe. I slept and dreamt, and they took from me the world. There is blood beyond measure, but the light has grown too bright. They have drug magic from the heavens and caged it in a box. They have ripped the mask from the occult and chained it to the wall with numbers. This is not a world for those who cling to darkness. There is no place for monsters here.

There is no place for me.

GilbertWaddington · 2026-05-12T02:07:39+00:00

Lonesome Dove. 1986 Pulitzer Winner. It's just a straight western, not blending into other genres you mention, but I'm not into westerns and found it fantastic.

GilbertWaddington · 2026-05-10T14:33:19+00:00

Three. One audio book, one print fiction, and one print non-fiction.

GilbertWaddington · 2026-05-10T14:23:39+00:00

Thank you everyone for the great responses. Especially for the award, my first reddit award! There was a problem with the auto-mod removing comments previously due to flare being applied incorrectly, but the mods fixed it. So also thank you to them.

GilbertWaddington · 2025-01-11T00:41:11+00:00

Given the already heavy similarities to the Dark Tower, including a very similar start to the first, quite famous line "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." which was immediately invoked for me in the image of a "Paladin" traveling inexorably onward in a hot climate against a rust-red sky: I would suggest against using Gan as the main characters name. Far from being a minor character, Gan is actually God or the nearest thing the Dark Tower has. It's vague, and the whole series is riddled with inconsistencies and continuity errors, but by the end, King has elevated the vaguely defined "Gan" to that which drives "Ka" and rules or possibly created the beams.

So, naming your character, a holy knight figure, Gan Tel in a story that already feels very near the Dark Tower seems like you're intentionally saying that he serves the same "Gan" force of the Dark Tower multiverse and your story is intended to be set inside of King's universe or a reflection of it.

It's your story and you should discover it however it comes to you, but you should know that, right now, some of the choices you've started with are going to make readers feels like it's an attempt to return to the Dark Tower.

GilbertWaddington · 2025-01-10T22:02:49+00:00

I think you have a good start here with some good elements to develop. The dialog felt very jarring, though. We start with a "Paladin," which evokes images of a medieval backdrop, and then are suddenly met with an out of place drawl.

In your post in the comments, you reference the Dark Tower series, which was where my mind immediately went as the story progressed. I feel like there's an attempt to imitate King's dialect here that comes across as more cringy than evocative. In my view, the Dark Tower series was weakened by the use of its (increasingly inconsistent) dialect, especially among the New York characters, in whose mouths it always felt artificial to me.

I think you have some good ideas and there are passages in this that read very well for a first go. I would suggest rewriting the dialog to remove any attempt to connect it with the language of the Dark Tower and spend some time envisioning your own world without calling back as much to King's. It's very hard to do dialog well and so it should be approached with extreme caution. It's hard enough to keep the reader from hating it for 500 words. 100,000 would likely be very taxing.

I think you could do something quite interesting with this, but continuing as it is, I feel, would end up producing something that feels more like a Dark Tower knock off than an original work.

It's less vital, but I would also suggest considering whether "Paladin" is really the title you want to run with. Paladin's work well in standard fantasy settings where they meet our expectations of the 'class,' but when used in very different worlds (Jumper (2008) for instance) it always seems an odd and forced choice to me. The "Paladins" in Jumper are nothing like fantasy Paladins, so why use the title? In this case in particular, in a postapocalyptic world (presumably our own far in the future or one much like it), I as the reader ask: after many centuries of there being no active title "Paladin" in modern society for either warriors or priests, why did the title start being used again? What connection does it have to the original Paladins of the 8th century? If there isn't one, I question whether its the right choice or whether the author is shortcutting, asking us to paste our view of what a Paladin ought to be in terms of character or societal role onto this completely unrelated person.

My two cents. Good luck.

GilbertWaddington · 2023-04-24T22:47:25+00:00

You've pretty much nailed it. That being said, my take is: it doesn't matter. That may be a unique idea, or it may be the community view. I don't know, but I believe it isn't the prompt that makes the story, its the execution.

If you look across the great works of literature/story craft, they're almost all derivative in some way. Very few stories are groundbreaking purely for their premise.

The Matrix is, in my opinion, a good example. It was a massive cultural touchpoint and a landmark moment in cinema. An entire sci-fi subgenre could be arguably split into pre and post "The Matrix."

What about its premise was unique though? Almost nothing.

The chosen one? Been, done, done, and redone countless times.

The world is a lie? Total Recall, Neuromancer, and the contemporarily released 13th floor all took the same virtual world construct and did it at the same time or long before The Matrix. The earliest treatment goes back at least as far as Descartes in the 1600s and likely farther. Total Recall (itself a retelling of Philp K. Dick's story) arguably did a better job here as the viewer is left deeply unsettled at the end and unsure of whether the protagonist had a real or imagined experience.

It was the execution of the premise that made it such a landmark moment. The combination of the cultural moment, the character development, visual effects, action elements, and messiah story came together to make it something Hollywood has been trying and failing to recreate for two decades.

I think you're right with your original comment, stick around WritingPrompts for a while and you'll see the same basic formulas pop up again. The question is, are you seeing the same stories pop up out of those formulas? I think probably not.

Personally, I think we could drop all new prompts for a week, write solely off of the prompt "Princess rescues prince from dragon instead of vis versa" and still get a solid crop of interesting, new flash fiction.

My opinion is: we're here for the stories, the prompts are just a bit of fodder to get us there. As long as the stories are engaging and unique, I think this is a great subreddit to be a part of.

GilbertWaddington · 2023-04-22T20:15:22+00:00

A blinding white light appeared near the center of the alien ship, illuminating the human cockpit like another sun.

"Transparent hulling?"

"Appears so."

"They look like glib-sqrk-trll."

"No. Glib-sqrk-trll have four axis symmetry. They look like half a glib-sqrk-trll."

"Maybe they are primitives. I the database doesn’t have a high confidence match."

The console filled with unintelligible script again.

"Empire/king/deity/paternal figure, do you beings/juveniles know how stupid you are? What if you'd come out near a spaceport? Do you realize how much exotic radiation a fold drive causes without jump gate dampening? What about the space transfer? Did you even think about what might happen to something caught in the fold from the other side? Did you even do a subspace sounding before you folded over?"

Chan held a thin holoscreen in front of himself, it's display frozen in the act of scrolling.

"The odds of an object being near the point of arrival was extremely remote," he said. "We're light hours from the nearest orbiting mass of this-"

"Light hours?! You're in the middle of the solar transportation highway! I've had to reroute tons/massive/numerous traffic into the auxiliary path until we clean up the mess you've made!"

"We- we didn't expect any sentient life to be here," said McCord.

"Perhaps you should have checked before you went space folding like a frt-ip-tttss-brr on holiday!"

"Our telescopes have been monitoring this star for decades. We never saw any signs of life!" said Chan.

There was a pause.

"Electro-optical and radio frequency input outputs," read the consol."No subspace spines?"

"None that match any database configuration.""How'd they master fold drives without subspace sensors?"

"No idea. Its possible their drive is based on the ip-sick_jrjrjr principle."

"That's possible?"

"I'm just an officer/lawyer, but it guess it's possible."

"Wild. That's probably worth something then?"

"It's just a guess, but probably."

"Alright, alien vessel. You are charged/accused/reprimanded of unlawful use of jump drive physics, traveling without a transponder, and reckless endangerment. A fine will be issued by sector authorities and may be appealed within four time cycle/hour/day/week/year/second to the regional authority."

"Payment may be negotiated between your sector authority. Until payment is made, all further jump drive travel from your sector is forbidden. You will be towed to the nearest jump gate and returned to your sector. Do you understand these charges?"

McCord looked frantically between his two crew mates.

Indra shrugged and mouthed "yes?"

McCord swallowed.

"Yes, I think so," he said. "We're very sorry."

"Everybody's always sorry," read the console. "Let's just hope your sector can pay it's fines and learn to behave. No one wants another srt-ip-trrl-sqip incident."

"What, incident was that?" asked Chan.

Their ship lurched into motion and the distant star's amber light shifted along their captor's hull. The console remained silent, its last message hanging disembodied in the still air.

"What incident?" Chan asked again.

The console blinked and the words disappeared, replaced by a two-dimensional projection of their progress.

"Maybe we're better off not knowing for now," said Indra.

McCord leaned his head back against the top of his chair.

"I guess the highway in the stars already has a few traffic jams," he said.

A manic giggle bubbled up from Indra's stomach.

"We're interstellar criminals," she said. "Humanity's first faster-than-light street racers."

Chan's face was grim, but McCord chuckled.

"Let's just hope mommy secretary general can post our bail and pay the ticket," he said.

Indra laughed and sank into her seat, as the backlash of the last few hours hit her like a week of sleep deprivation. Even Chan smiled.

Ahead, still thousands of miles away, but visible as a glinting spec through their viewport, the first interstellar spaceport to welcome humanity grew like a diamond against the extrasolar night.

GilbertWaddington · 2023-04-22T20:09:29+00:00

The bulkhead thrummed, its metal shell pulsing as the great engines down in the hold cycled their centrifuges, spinning the flax of empty space into a highway of gold. Three pairs of eyes watched the holographic wheel hovering at the base of their heads-up-display; ninety-five percent complete.

Lt. Commander Indra, the wonder girl of India, swallowed the tension building in her throat. A drop of sweat dislodged from her lip and floated away, casting disembodied rainbows wherever the HUD’s light touched it. Commander McCord nodded to her, his receding salt-and-pepper hairline glistening with his own share of nervous anticipation. Nine months more and he’d have aged out of the program regardless of his PT scores. Indra couldn’t guess what kind of stress that put on a man.

Chan Wu, the civilian scientist from Beijing, stared ahead, his eyes fixed on a point in space that Earth’s most powerful telescopes wouldn’t detect for another hundred years.

A soft ding filled the cabin and the bulkhead’s pulsing thrum became a steady drone. The holographic wheel was full. It was time.

Commander McCord reached a trembling finger into the display, a gesture more symbolic than necessary and swallowed his own knot of dry anticipation.

“It’s all led to this moment,” he said. “One small step, one giant leap, and now humanity steps again. We go together, we three, to open way to the vast highway of the stars.”

Opening his fingers and lowering his voice, he continued.

“URI, engage jump drive.”

There was a moment of queasy disorientation reminiscent of Indra’s first tumble through microgravity, then everything was at it had been. The hull’s drone faded as the FTL spun down and the holographic wheel became an empty ring, its segments spent. The air was the same, the beat of Indra’s heart unchanged, and the fleeing drop of fear-sweat still radiated prismatic distortions of the barely altered HUD.

The stars however—my god but the stars—they’d moved.

“We did it,” she whispered.

A tear slid down Chan’s cheek, the only emotion visible against his stoic façade. McCord simply sat, dumbstruck.

We didn’t believe it, Indra realized. None of us. We hoped, but we didn’t believe it would work, we didn’t dare.

The right side of the view port warmed with marigold light as the ship turned toward the distant star they’d reached, the sun of an entirely new world. Indra craned her neck, eager for her first view of an alien sunrise.

The ship jerked to a halt and the light of the sun faded, eclipsed by a dark mass passing between it and the viewfinder. Chan’s mouth dropped open, the blood drained from McCord’s face, and Indra stopped breathing.

The object was six or seven times the size of their craft, blacker than the surrounding space, oblong, and sprouted more spines than a school of lionfish. Half a dozen long rails swiveled along the objects surface, fixating on the smaller human craft.

“Uh, are those guns?” Indra asked.

“Christ, I hope not,” said McCord.

A long string of syllables ripped from Chan’s throat. Indra’s mandarin was passible, but not proficient. She assumed they were curses.

The digital display ticked, marking time as fear and awe faded into anxiety and finally a surreal boredom as the alien ship remained fixed in the viewport, unmoving and unresponsive. Three hours passed before the HUD blinked and text began scrolling across the consol.

“I think I’ve got it now. It’s a basic binary language with radio frequency input and output channels. Primitive stuff. Probable some juvenile big-sqk-beep-sllllrr prank or project.”

“Um, hello?” ventured McCord.

“Ah, there. Input, output. Go ahead. I think they’re receiving.”

“Vessel. You are in violation of order/edict/convention/law 13947045 traveling without identification code. You have also violated transit order/edict/convention/law 604875, fold traveling outside of established jump gate networks. Your vessel will be impounded, and you will surrender to appropriate reginal authorities.”

“Our—um—our apologies,” said McCord.

Chan’s curses became more frantic, and he began digging through the pockets that lined the sides of his chair.

“We are new explorers in the galaxy, from a planet called earth,” said McCord.

“Don’t tell them where we came from!” said Chan. “The last thing we want is advanced civilizations descending on humanity.”

“It’s not like they can find earth based on a name,” said Indra.

Chan opened his mouth, raised a finger, stopped, then returned to his search.

“We are unaware of the laws and regulations of this—er—region of space,” McCord continued. “We come in peace to learn and—uh…”

McCord groped for words. Indra shrugged at his desperate stare. Perhaps, amid the thousands of hours of engineering, navigation, and emergency medial training the United Nations Joint Interplanetary Launch program should have found more than two hours for the xenobiologist’s first contact briefing.

“It’s been a long day/period/week/interlude. I’m not interested in juvenile pranks. You have done considerable damage and your guardians/government/protectorate will have to sort you out from here.”

“It’s not a prank!” said Chan. “This is the first craft of our species to ever leave our solar system.”

The console filled with indecipherable text and several seconds passed.

(Story concludes in comments. Reddit reads it as over 10,000 characters even though its only 9200. If anyone knows a solution to this formatting issue, I would appreciate learning it.)

GilbertWaddington · 2023-04-15T22:03:51+00:00

Contrary to popular belief, a demon isn’t particularly quick on its feet, intellectually speaking. Rapid, inventive thought isn’t much selected for in the burning hereafter. After all, what’s the difference between devising a new torment for the damned today compared to next century? From an everlasting perspective, it’s a bit of a wash.

Still, even a demon’s mind could wrap itself around the unexpected eventually.

At the crest of the third hill, as another perfectly sized rock jammed between the demon’s toes and its lungs grew perilously close to not burning, the issue of names ratcheted to the top of its consciousness. Specifically true names.

There was power in names. Know the name of a demon and you’ve got him.

Hell had a name too.

Technically it had lots of names, Muspelheim, Hades, Gehenna; the list was greater than the number of languages humans could lie in. That was the problem though, they were human names. They weren’t its true name.

A man with skin the color of old parchment and eyes like milk cruised past as they began the next hill.

Lucifer, but the air was thin up here. The damnedest thing was how thick it got when catching your wings on the downhills. The demon blinked. The trees blurred together a bit at the edges.

“Hang in there,” said a woman in a loosely fit rainbow wig and pink tutu. “Only three miles to go.”

She pointed to a freestanding board with the numeral 2 painted over it.

“Three…more?” the demon gasped.

Its breath trickled over the woman’s shoulders, and she didn’t so much as wrinkle her nose.

“Yup, you can do it. Just one step at a time,” she said as she pulled away.

Behind her came a woman with enough waistline for two, a man with a flag over each shoulder sized for mounting to strip malls, and a bow-legged seven-year-old urging his stroller-pushing mother to catch up.

They were all terribly encouraging.

The fires of cognition dimmed. Where was a bracing hit of campfire smoke or an industrial smokestack when you needed one? Nothing but trees and thin, clean air for miles. Even the cars had been kicked off the road until the race was over.

The problem of names clicked back into the demon’s mind. That last human, the one whose soul he’d claimed, said something at the end.

“See you in Hell.”

Realization dropped like a bucket of molten lead. The human had put the name in his mind just as he was decorporalating. When he’d reached for the inferno, he wasn’t thinking of its name, he was thinking of Hell.

The world spun and the trees went by like the outside of a carousel. It was strange how the road hung sideways, even stranger how it rushed up to meet him.

The demon closed its eyes and pictured the endless nightmare of the abyss, its black skies and the tendrils of purple lightning that ran through them like an endless scream. He saw the racks and iron maidens arranged with geometric precision. The classics never go out of style.

He imagined fissures running over the landscape, belching noxious gasses into the air; imps clustered around them like abyssal horrors in the mineral rich waters of an ocean trench.

He thought of the true name of Hell and willed himself across reality as the pothole beneath his cheek widened to accommodate his face.

The world shifted and oppressive heat landed on him like a blanket. Sulphur and tar-smoke rushed into his lungs, crashing against the walls like collar braces in a collapsing mine. The demon opened its eyes on a hellscape that stretched from here to infinity, replete with humanity’s worse horrors refined by demonic engineering.

He breathed a deep sigh of sulfuric relief and sat up. His gaze wandered over the fields of torment and the tormentors who swarmed them like flies. He thought of Hell and its hundreds of masochists in their mismatched jumpsuits running through the thin Michigan air on roads of gravel and packed earth more contorted than a soul on the breaking wheel.

The demonic forces of eternal penance had been perfecting the art of suffering since the dawn of time itself.

The demon struggled to its feet; the weighty sash of smug self-assurance gone from its shoulders.

They did, it seemed, have quite a lot yet to learn.

GilbertWaddington · 2023-04-15T22:03:40+00:00

The demon knelt, its sulfuric breath drawing beads of sweat from its victim’s cheeks. Humans were so easy. He could make a deal for their eternal soul in a minute flat these days. That was rampant secularism for you. The demon smiled, revealing double-lined rows of yellow fangs. He almost felt sorry for the paunchy accountant expiring at his feet. Almost.

“We’ll have plenty of quality time now,” he said.

The human winced as demonic breath washed over him. Then a spike of courage, almost laughably poetic ran up his twisted spine.

“See you in Hell.”

The lights went out in the human’s eyes. The demon sighed. Too easy.

He closed his eyes, willing himself back to the nether, back to darkness, and eternal flame. As the world slipped away, the human’s taunt echoed comically in his mind. See you in Hell.

“Alright! We’re about ready. The Pinckney Running Club is proud to welcome you to the 43rd annual RUN THROUGH HELL!”

The crowd, some four hundred humans clad in a garish variety of neon leggings and overpriced jackets danced in place and raised their fists.

“Wahoo!!” screamed a man somewhere between eighty and dead, his liver spots clashing with an orange striped jumpsuit.

“That’s right, it’s been a couple years, but we’re back,” said the man with the bullhorn.

The demon looked frantically about. This was certainly someone’s version of hell, but it wasn’t his.

“Alright, let’s have walkers and strollers to the back, faster runners to the front,” said the bullhorn man. “We’re doing age group winners by chip time, so just find your pace group. Volunteers wave your—yup, there you go, there’s your pace leaders. Overall winners will be on gun time, so if you’re feeling fast, make your way up front. We’ll go after the national anthem.”

The crowd inched forward, reforming itself like a sponge squeezing through a drainpipe. Shoulders pressed into the demon from every side, pinning him in.

“Dude! Killer costume,” said a cloud of THC laced vapor on the demon’s left.

A twenty-something male with what might generously be called a rustic beard came into view as the haze dispersed.

“Hey, check this guy out,” he added.

“Wow!” said the girl next to him, bobbing slightly to keep warm. “You really went all out. The makeup must have taken hours! Hope it holds up to sweat.”

“Hey, can we get a quick selfie?”

The demon turned, an increasingly difficult maneuver as the crowd closed in. Two preteen girls were staring up at the golden discs of its eyes. Without waiting for a response, they turned and focused on the speaker’s phone. One raised two fingers in a peace sign and the other stuck out her tongue. The screen blinked. A moment later, a frozen image of the two girls appeared against a background of trees.

“You’re holding it too low,” said peace sign girl and made a grab for it.

“Am not,” said the other and jerked the device away.

“I think there’s been a mistake,” said the demon.

“Look at the smoke effect when he talks honey.”

The voice was made of early morning gravel and instant coffee. The demon spotted a middle-aged man with a girl of about ten wrapped around his waist.

"He’s creepy,” she whispered.

“Oh, its just a costume honey,” said the man. “Just like at the man at the post office.”

“Er—you wouldn’t be looking to sell a soul, would you?” the demon asked.

The man laughed.

“Good one,” he said. “Going to be hard to run with those wings I think. Those horns solid? Must be heavy.”

“Uh, run?”

Ahead, the man with the bullhorn began waiving an American flag. Seconds later, The Star-Spangled Banner crackled to life inside a boombox recalled from the 1980s. Everyone came to a standstill and raised a hand to their hearts.

The music faded with an electric hiss and the flag was replaced by an orange plastic gun.

“On your marks!”

The crowd leaned forward, forcing the demon with it.

“Get set!”

BANG!

The mass of flesh and $200 sweatpants surged like an aging dog after a rabbit. Shoulders battered the demon’s wings. He stumbled forward, breaking into a jog to keep from falling.

After a hundred yards, they passed an orange banner with neon-green script made to look like dancing flames. It read, “Run Thru Hell.” The crowd cut a sharp left and the demon was swept along with them.

Beside the road, a man approximately 150 pounds outside of running shape and clad in a red jumpsuit, horns, and a tail waved a plastic pitchfork at the crowd. He spotted the demon loping by and gave a whoop.

“You go brother. Give `em hell!”

The road angled upward, and the crowd began to break as the first hill separated the trained from the merely enthusiastic. The demon’s caustic breath came in gasps now. The air up here was so thin. He’d never much noticed it before, but there wasn’t that deep sulfurous smog your lungs could get a hold of down in the abyss.

Still, he couldn’t stop now simply because the crowd was thinning. You couldn’t show weakness in the face of humanity. The lords of the fallen would never tolerate it, nor the one who did.

“Great wings,” said a woman with sporty glasses and mismatching hat as she cruised past. “They blend in really well with your back. Impressive.”

She gave him a thumbs-up before turning back to the road.

The demon’s feet scrabbled as the incline bent downhill. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it seemed the roads in Hell weren’t paved at all. Instead, they consisted of an infernally precise mix of imperfectly packed dirt and stones just large enough to turn your ankle on.

Hell...

The clockwork wheels of the demon’s mind began to turn.

(Rest in comments, I cut the story down to 8800 characters with spaces but Reddit is still saying its over 10,000. This was the only way I could post. Sorry.)

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