Inferno

**Inferno**

Inferno is a place of terror, suffering, and unspeakable beauty. It is a world of winding staircases, yawning shafts, torture chambers, majestic halls, and dark catacombs. In Inferno’s endless labyrinths, the traveler can encounter raging storms, devoted pilgrims, and grand and terrible sights. Blind augurs bend over autopsy tables of stainless steel, desperately trying to discover truths and predictions in steaming entrails. Nailed to nightmarish monuments, entranced lunatics sing their praises to the Death Angels and pain itself. Here, Astaroth and his Death Angels rule from their enormous Citadels. Those seeking answers to the riddles of Time and Space may find hidden truths in Inferno’s lofty towers, abandoned libraries, or in prostration before its alien cogwheels and machines. In deep meditation, the nepharites stretch out their minds to find paths into Elysium, tasting our ripe world, luring the unwary, and trying to slip through. Our torture institutions, prisons, death camps, and psychiatric hospitals all border on Inferno, as are countless other places baptized in blood and suffering – the home of a serial killer, mass graves after innumerable executions, and war zones. A world so distant, yet so terrifyingly close.

**The Black Citadels**

The Black Citadels of Inferno are the mirror images of the Archons' citadels in Metropolis. They stretch upwards to the sky and deep down into the Underworld. They are grotesque buildings created from the impossible architecture of nightmares. Gothic towers with patinated statues, twisted passageways, stone arches, vast machine halls, and metallic grids all mix together in an architectural tour de force. Mold, creeping vines, and poisonous plants cling to their facades and rusty pipes, perpetually leaking garbage and chemical waste. Within their walls, there are deep shafts, rattling elevators, stairs, and tunnels descending into the depths. Beneath the ground, they spread out like enormous labyrinths, an endless network of torture chambers, dank cells, great balls, flaming kilns, glittering shrines, charnel pits, echoing amphitheaters, and stygian catacombs. Behind each door and beyond every portal, waits something wondrous and terrible. Here, the souls tied to Inferno are tortured and death gives no release.

The screams of the tormented ring throughout the balls, abysses, and galleries of steel. On operating tables, helpless victims are vivisected time and time again, their blood splashing over the tile walls, entrails torn out and thrown to the cement floor with a wet thud. Upon altars of marble, children are flayed alive by leering nepharites while their parents are forced to watch, only to then be forced to skin their loved ones themselves, dragged deeper and deeper down into madness. In thundering machine balls, rusty drills are driven into weeping, praying sinners while priests bold mass and collect the shed blood in golden vessels. Delicate, gossamer mirages tremble in the silent catacombs, echoing whispers of still-existent hope, tenderness, and love, only to dissolve like fog in the darkness. Naked purgatides impale their victims on skewers, drown them in waste oil, or burn off their faces with blow torches. Those waiting their turn listen to the screams and caress each other into ecstasy, searching in vain for some respite from the agony. The vestals of pain create works of art from peeled skin and viscera under black stone arches, while bawling infants are eaten alive by insects crawling at their feet.

Feral people dwell in sewer-like, claustrophobic culverts; occasionally they manage to find their way into our world. Amid chains and hooks, demons and lost souls find solace in the most forbidden sexual desires, their semen and vaginal discharge churning with blood and bile. In stinking cesspits, the innocent are force-fed each other's urine, feces, and vomit. Bodies scream, tremble, sob, and beg for mercy, although they should be long dead. Here though, they find no peace, no reprieve, as Inferno's surgeons patch them up again so their tortures can be resumed anew. Existence is an odyssey of entrancing, unparalleled cruelties. Humanity's aggregate desires and sadistic tendencies have been condensed down into hellish experimentation, where souls are punished, mutilated, and torn asunder in ceaseless repetition until their sense of self is completely obliterated.

Occasionally. kidnapped or unlucky servants of the Archons are subjected to the most insane suffering in Inferno. Angels are raped on altars of basalt. while lictors are cut up bit by bit. but are not allowed to die. Only through submitting themselves completely to Astaroth, drinking the god’s murky blood from the veins of his Incarnates, and devoting themselves to torture can they hope to continue to exist as his faithful servants.

**Suffering’s Oubliette**

The suffering experienced by those tortured in Inferno is as horrific as it is sublime. Every voice is like an instrument, and when heard together the hundreds of thousands of souls become a wondrous symphony. echoing throughout the worlds, magnificent and awful.

Just as a terrible storm can be beautiful to behold, suffering is like an unbridled force of nature, and every bit as entrancing. When souls are mangled, broken down, mutilated, and shattered over and over again, the experience in and of itself becomes a work of art. carried out with religious fervor.

The souls are drawn into the Death Angels' Citadels or into numerous purgatories. Each and every soul is drawn to the Principle they have been closest to, or torn apart and divided between the Higher Powers. Thereafter, their thoughts, sensations, desires, and knowledge are extracted out of them via torture and degradation.

This spiritual force nourishes the creatures of Inferno.

Astaroth cups his hands and holds them out, capturing our souls pouring down like sacrificial wine for him to drink from. He lets his Death Angels share in his gluttony. helping them to grow and extend their influences.

When only apathy remains, all memories, sorrows, thoughts, aspirations, fantasies, and dreams have been torn away, and our souls are completely depleted, we are finally set free. We have nothing more to give our captors and our suffering lacks meaning. Often these empty souls are allowed to wander across Inferno in desolate pilgrimages, tattered and lost, before finding their way to Astaroth's Citadel. They enter the black portal, descend into the black sea, and finally achieve peace - only to be reborn in Elysium.

Not all who end up in Inferno become its victims. The most creative murderers who do not feel any guilt or shame can be honored as gods or heroes. They are invited to lavish tables to eat and drink, and thereafter continue to spread their suffering. Those who suffered unimaginable torments in life are given crowns and allowed to live as tyrants, while others become their slaves. But this blessing is a temporary deception, and soon the roles shift, allowing the slaves to punish their tormentors. Those who have the greatest insight into dark truths, distinguishing themselves in cruelty, or lust for torment are sometimes embraced as disciples and baptized in blood. It is always possible to climb upwards in Inferno's hierarchy. Displays of utter ruthlessness are always rewarded. Some of these aspirants become purgatides and razides, or are taken into the nepharites' clergy. They become part of their Death Angel's Principle and have its mark branded into their soul.

**Purgatories**

Purgatories are a special kind of hell. Individually unique, these prisons are created out of our own memories, dreams, fantasies, and thoughts, all in a toxic stew of feelings of shame and guilt. Once there, we are forced to confront what we most dread and desire. The nepharites can read our wants, motivations, and fears and create a suitable prison for us, but subconsciously we allow them to fetter us.

In their purgatories, sinners experience their nightmarish lives over and over again, trapped in dreamlike worlds formed from locations from their past or their most terrible fears. A suicide bomber is forced to blow himself to pieces time and time again, but cannot die. His fragmented meat is alive and screaming, as it painfully reassembles. He realizes those killed on the bus he bombed are his own family members, who must join with him, suffering together and filled with hatred for him. The mother who drowned her own child is so overladen with guilt she is forever forced to wander the slimy seabed, searching for her little son while eels lay eggs in her belly and fish devour her eyes. The sun, glittering on the water's surface, and hope of forgiveness remain constantly out of reach

In contrast to Inferno's torture halls, purgatories often exist very close to our world, hovering on the Illusion's outskirts.

They form pocket universes of their own, not quite unlike the tattered dream worlds of Limbo. They exist close to locations where each sinner perished or where they had their strongest ties. Therefore, purgatories are places where the Illusion is weak and creatures can sometimes move between the worlds.

\**Information taken from the Kult: Divinity Lost Playbook*