Remnants of the cat linger in the air, a yellow glow bound to the drift of green haze. Ruby takes it as a start, good as heading in any direction, but after scattering Kaicif’s afterimage with the brisk of his step, a bloody rapid amputates the road forward.

  Through his nose, he clears his lungs of air, then takes a drag and tends to the ash of his cigarette. Slowly, it falls into the rapid before it is instantly rushed under the outer wall of the spiders’ fortress to his right, continuing in subterranean pursuit of the pool that broke his fall.

  Sidling along the rotten wall is certainly an option, but sighing, Ruby checks its top for the obvious. Sure enough, a dozen snouted soldiers are already in position with crossbows, focused and ready to defend their treasure. One of them glowers at the man with eight eyes that read, “just try it, scum.”

  Plan B is to jump the crimson river, only looking to be about fifteen feet wide, but as Ruby backs up to get a running start, a monstrous figure comes into view. A demon hound that, even on all fours, stands almost as tall as the addict, drags the mangled upper half of a human corpse towards a den carved into a small mound of bones along the rapid’s opposite edge.

  Once close enough, Ruby notices that most of the fur and flesh have rotted away from the hound’s mid-section, leaving its shrunken and aching stomach exposed. With such a choice meal tucked between its jaws, the state of the beast’s belly would be difficult to comprehend if not for the emergence of three small houndlings from its den. Coats speckled with rot, they whine with dulled voice boxes as if they were starving and eagerly awaiting the return of mother hound, and not wanting to become a part of their meal, Ruby decides jumping the river is out of the question.

  With snouted spiders blocking the south and demon dogs guarding the east, option three is to follow the blood-red rapid north. There, it takes a sharp turn to the left, thinning out and running adjacent to the snouted spiders’ fortress at a distance of thirty meters. Many narrower streams flow into the rapid, some from ponds much smaller than that of the spiders, and others from mound-top basins like bleeding volcanoes.

  Decay actively rains upon the accursed wetland past the rapid, and not just into neatly organized piles. Sure, the sky pours blood into the ponds and basins, and specific anatomical materials are sorted into collections of the same stuff, but small bits of bone and clumps of human chum also pelt the ground at random – must be a byproduct of the carvers’ carnage taking place above the sky’s dense gray clouds.

  Looks like a place to suffer, the northern route, either by a stray bone shard through the skull or the chance of being swallowed by blood-infused quicksand. Even debris that misses the crimson pools makes a splash, showing that crossing the rapid would entail trapsing through soil much less stable than the ground, dry, cracked and solid, which Ruby currently stands upon.

  So much for ‘following my will,’ Ruby tilts his head back and exhales a plume of smoke before making the only choice in direction he has left. Not far to the west, the rapid, thus far flowing easterly, abruptly switches directions, heading downhill ever so slightly. The point where the switch occurs looks like jaws of blood, an individual, glossy flow zigzagging to form each sharp tooth.

  Even if it *was* by process of elimination, at least heading downhill seems right. After all, reaching hell’s depths is the goal, and Kaicif said itself that there is no higher peak in hell than this one.

  So, following the rapid west, Ruby winds around mound after mound, poking out like boulders of human scrap from what is clearly a gradually declining mountain. For the most part, the descent is graceful and easy on the ankles, but after about half a mile, it comes to a steep drop off, transmuting the rapid into a short cascade and forcing the addict to take a harsh slide down. The impact shocks his knees and causes the ash of his now dying cigarette to burst and contaminate the air.

  A few paces further brings Ruby to the end of his guiding rapid, pouring into a small puddle at the base of a mound somewhat unique from the hundreds he passed to get here. Thin trickles of blood leak down its surface, creating what looks like a network of veins, and between each oozing vessel is not the remains of humankind. No, this mound consists of only animal remains… the kind of animals people keep as pets.

  The compact jaw of a bulldog, the barren ribcage of a cat, the scaley tail of some large reptile. If the park bench and its lamp were caught in the crossfire of Ruby’s damnation, who could say these animals did not meet the same misfortune. It is a jarring realization for the addict, but one with a silver lining, one that makes him grateful for his shortcomings as a caretaker. Any pet that could have accompanied him in the woods earlier that night died long ago from neglect… hopefully ended up some place better.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  This fleshy cairn of the innocent is also peppered with small caverns from which strange creatures begin to peek out. Their bodies are baby-like, though the largest one is only half the size of a newborn, and their faces are hidden by animal masks. One wears the mask of a brown bear, one wears that of a crow, and another, a giraffe, bumping the top of its head as it tries to catch a glimpse of the addict. Each mask looks all too organic, as if they are the severed heads of actual miniature animals.

  From a hole towards the bottom of the mound, one baby emerges completely, sliding down the rot to reach cracked, gray soil. It lands on its hands and knees, taking a few seconds to struggle to its feet before walking upright towards Ruby. Above its shoulders, it is elephant, trunk curled and stiff, refusing to move with the rest of its body.

  Squatting down to get a better view of the creature, Ruby watches its hands extend towards him… wanting something. In a short drag, he finishes his cigarette, twists the last few specs of burning tobacco into the ground, and gently places the extinguished stump in the elephant baby’s hands. It stumbles, arching its back to hold the weight of Ruby’s garbage, and stares at the ground, confused… that was not at all what it wanted.

  But no matter, a curiosity for strange creatures does not imply an understanding of them, and it is beside the point. While he has plenty of time, the clock is ticking for Ruby’s buzz to wear off, and it is time to start looking for another cigarette… or at the very least, continue heading downhill.

  Thus, he bids the elephant baby farewell, knocking it on its butt with a light flick to the trunk, lets out something between a grunt and a chuckle, and leaves. This time without a river of blood to follow, the hike downhill is really more of a wander, guided only by an inconsistent decline. And as miles and minutes are left behind, so too does the mountain of remains become somehow more lifeless.

  Eastward echoes of cracking bones and sopping flesh still linger in the air, but here, the carvers’ waste rains less and less until it ceases altogether, leaving the piles of human parts sparse. Barren. Forgotten. Just bones. Bones dry as can be – bones from which the skin, muscle and fat have disintegrated from existence. Piles of them become increasingly smaller as the terrain smooths into a flat plain, and the large open spaces left between are littered with dark spots of moisture and insects where indiscriminate mounds of red and white flesh used to stand. Truly, the carvers less picky in their harvest cast down waste that is much kinder to hell’s soil.

  Promising… Ruby crosses his arms, surveying the first major change in scenery since he departed from the mountain’s peak. But three miles later, it is a mountain no more, and ancient remnants of carver activity do nothing to obscure the gray horizon. There, in the center of Ruby’s vision, is a large, motionless shadow, both looming and alluring.

  A brief glimpse is all it takes to trap his gaze, and drawing closer to the shadow, the sickening smell in the air transitions to that of a particular chemical – one that is no less tied to death than the scent of rot – formaldehyde. Its nose burn intensifies the closer Ruby gets, and once close enough to clearly make out the shadow’s details, the chemical effect is so heavy in the air that he must do so with stinging, watery eyes.

  Before him stands a massive Victorian building, its pristine white walls decorated with intricate gold patterns and at least a hundred false windows, not boarded up, but simply never possessing glass panes in the first place. Judging by their elongated forms, the rectangular structure is made up of three floors, though, it is tall enough to fit six if the false windows also happen to be a false judge of floorage.

  The center front of its flat roof is home to a large skeleton painted in dimly flickering pink and green neon. Laying on its side, one arm is propped to support a contortedly smiling skull dressed in a childish sleeping cap, and the other is extended to welcome the addict.

  To either side of the building, the land is suspicious, looking like an inverted image of the scenery before it instead of a continuation of the long-abandoned wastes. But… what really captures Ruby’s attention is a set of tall, red doors, separated from the soil by two short steps and a porch shaped from white marble. The doors are flat and plain except for a constantly changing line of runes running across the middle of their lengths. Just ink on painted wood, but somehow… alive.

  Symbols cycle mostly between esoteric characters Ruby does not understand, but occasionally, it lands on one he does. The first meaningful word that manifests lingers for a moment, “vacancies?” he reads before it scrambles again in search of another. Next, it lands on “rest,” but weirdly, there is not a thread of exhaustion in him.

  Then, the words become more enticing – “an aquarium?” … “a way down?” … “smoke… shop?” Before Ruby even realizes his body is moving, his hands reach for the doors’ silver handles. At the instant of contact, a large, comically circular, bloodshot eye tears open at the top of each door like flesh ripping between horse and tree. The hinges themselves follow suit, making way for a black, rotten tongue, thick and as wide as the addict’s upper body. Jutting out of perfect darkness, it binds him and drags him through a painless moment of unpleasant moisture.