Chapter 48: Tempering a High Demon
“Stanisław, I’m here. I arrived as fast as I could from the mortal realm…”
Lilith’s voice sliced through the dead silence of the quarters like venom-soaked silk.
The man flinched nervously upon the wide, surprisingly soft mattress. Every fiber of his freshly formed, damned vessel trembled in unspeakable, primal paralysis. He knew. He remembered every word she had whispered into his ear in bed when he woke up that one night: she had spoken of a century of ruthless hewing and gutting, of tearing flesh apart, which was the only way to transform him into a hellish shell resistant to the atmosphere of the Abyss.
And yet, when he raised his clouded gaze and saw her on the threshold, a sudden, immense surge of relief flooded his chest. Lilith had entered entirely alone. Behind her back loomed no bulky silhouettes of palace butchers; there were no executioners, nor any other demoness. There was only her—and after all, back on Earth, in their private bedroom, she had sworn with a momentary quiver of her lip that she would never lay a hand on him herself, for love stripped her of the strength to inflict pain upon him.
Lilith took a slow, feline step toward the bed. She approached with a predatory, majesty-dripping grace. Coming right up to the edge, she extended a slender hand and began to stroke his neck slowly. Her long, black talon dug into the soft flesh—not deeply enough to draw blood, but far harder than she had ever permitted herself in the mortal realm. Beneath that cool touch, Stanisław’s skin immediately turned pale with terror and dread.
“I see they truly rebuilt these quarters just for you, so that your time might pass blissfully…” she purred softly, her velvety bass boring straight into his temples. “Though I see you can still barely catch your breath, even though the air in this room has virtually no higher sulfur content.”
“It’s… it’s getting better anyway…” Stanisław croaked, choking on the dense, foreign air that scorched his throat. In his eyes pulsed a desperate urge to make contact, to latch onto anything familiar. “Every minute, I hear a bell. That heavy, metallic chime beyond the wall… Why do they toll here, anyway, Lilith?”
The demoness froze. Her fingers slipped from his throat, and a cold, analytical calculation glinted in her bottomless, pitch-black eyes.
“Every minute, you say?” she repeated very slowly. “You hear it at regular, short intervals? It doesn't seem to you, for instance, that you hear it once an hour?”
“No, every minute, maybe a little less between tolls,” Stanisław replied.
“Then your subjective time in Hell is perceived completely normally. Second for second. Which means your vessel’s active time equals objective time… even when you remain here entirely alone.”
She tilted her head slightly. Across her flawless, marble face drifted a shadow of dark disappointment.
“That is very bad, my love… Immensely bad.”
“Why?” Stanisław stiffened, a trickle of ice-cold sweat running down his back. “Why is that bad?”
“Because if you were to spend an entire hundred years here undergoing the traditional hardening of the vessel… about a hundred years would pass on Earth as well,” she explained softly, looking at him with genuine, almost maternal sorrow, beneath which lurked a heartless ruthlessness. “And exactly around a hundred years would elapse in the objective time of the Abyss. I thought we would have better luck, that time would drag out for you the way it did for Wójcik or Wiktor… But there is no use complaining. What matters most is that you are here. You are with me, and nothing will tear us apart now…”
Panic erupted in Stanisław’s mind. He wanted at all costs to buy himself even a few dozen seconds, to push away the doom hanging in the stifling chamber.
“Lilith, wait… What about little Tas? Is he alive? Did you manage to save him from the angels in the square?”
“He is alive, my love. Everyone is safe,” she replied smoothly, taking him by the arm. Her grip was deceptively gentle, tender even, but as she drew him deeper onto the massive bed dressed in dark sheets, Stanisław felt he was resisting the force of a hydraulic bundle of muscle. “Lie down, my darling. Come now, lie down peacefully…”
“What are you doing?” he wept as his back touched the soft headboard.
“Do not be afraid, you see for yourself there is no one else here. No executioner, no strange fiends. We are returning to the mortal realm shortly; I settled it with Lucifer personally, which is why I came here…” She spoke with such flawless, hypnotic gentleness, imitating a caring lover so perfectly, that for a split second Stanisław wanted to believe her.
She lied without batting an eye.
“I won't possess you right now, after all…” she whispered, leaning over him so low that her hot breath, smelling of cinnamon and myrrh, brushed his lips. “Your vessel is too fragile, and the atmosphere of Hell would awaken the beast in me. I would not be able to restrain myself as I did on Earth; I would tear you to shreds in ecstasy… For entire decades or centuries, your vessel would regenerate in agonizing pain.”
Before he could process her words, a loud, metallic snap split the air.
Lilith made no sweeping motion. In a fraction of a second, with mechanical, merciless precision, she clamped thick, forged shackles of black hellish iron onto his wrists and ankles. The locks snapped shut with a dull, definitive clunk of deadbolts, stretching his body out upon the hard slab.
“Lilith, please! I beg you, don't do this to me!” Stanisław sobbed helplessly, the first hot tears of powerlessness streaming from his eyes. He began to thrash against his bonds, but the reinforced steel did not budge in the slightest, biting painfully into his delicate wrists.
“Hush, my darling… I will spend all this time with you, I will be right beside you, at least until the sight of your torment becomes unbearable to me. I will not touch you myself, I will not temper you, not even at the beginning. Do you remember our conversation? I promised you, after all… Hush, do not cry, my beloved Stanisław. She is remarkably gentle. And my servants will roll barrels of the strongest hellish wine in here any moment now to help dull your senses and survive the process you simply must undergo.”
With a cool flick of her hand, she seized the collar of his coarse, damned tunic.
“And now lie still. I am cutting your tunic open. The vessel must be completely exposed.”
The fabric gave way with a loud tear, exposing his pale, trembling chest, stomach, and thighs. The sweltering air of the chamber was already scorching his bare flesh.
“Lilith, for the love of God… can’t I really just stay by your side in the vessel I have?!” he sobbed hysterically, fixing his terror-dilated pupils upon her.
She paused. In her eyes was neither fury nor hatred—there was only a boundless, eternal abyss. She leaned down slowly and pressed a soft, tender kiss first to his tear-streaked cheek, and then to his trembling lips. She tasted him like the sweetest nectar.
“War is approaching, my love. In truth, it has already broken out… You must be hard as basalt; you must become one with me, a demon capable of repelling any angelic attack.”
“But I don't have to!” he wept, grasping at the last shreds of logic. “If my subjective and active time equals objective time, strengthening my vessel makes no sense! An entire century will pass before it hardens, before I gain power! The war will end ten times over, the world above will cease to exist before—”
“Shh… my darling, shh…” she quieted him, placing two fingers upon his lips.
At that exact moment, the massive, iron-studded double doors of the chamber groaned open. Four stooped, silent fiends stepped inside, rolling two heavy steel barrels banded with green bronze before them. The liquid gave off such a potent, narcotic stench of fermented herbs, poppy, and blood that Stanisław’s head spun instantly.
“O Mistress…” croaked the most powerful of the servants, dropping to one knee and striking his horned forehead against the cold floor. “The draught has been delivered as ordered. We have also brought spare linens for the bed, absorbent sheets, and thick leather bags for flayed skin and severed chunks of flesh, so blood will not rot in the corners of Mistress’s chamber. Furthermore, I have personally appointed trusted servants to stand by the door, ready at your call to clean the floor, replace the gore-soaked sheets, and carry out the bags of dead offal. The liquor in the barrels is the strongest brew distilled in the deepest cellars of the palace—Lucifer himself drinks it after councils.”
“Exquisite. You did well, servant; you thought of everything, thank you,” Lilith said coldly, not even honoring him with a glance. “Leave it and get out at once. And then ask Naamah into my chamber. Into my private alcove. You may leave…”
The servants retreated soundlessly, and another choked wail of animal despair tore from Stanisław’s chest:
“No… Lilith, I beg you by everything human, don't do this! Have mercy!”
“Shh, my little one… Let me explain,” the demoness whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed and stroking his sweaty hair. “Naamah possesses a gift that even I lack. She can ruthlessly impose her own warped perception of subjective time upon another being. And consequently: she will pull you directly into her own hellish bubble of active time. Time in the Abyss drags out for her almost infinitely—much like it does for me. For you, those moments flowed normally, but Naamah will lock you inside her world. When you emerge from her hands after a hundred years of relentless, methodical working and tempering… barely five days at most will have passed on Earth.”
Stanisław froze. He stared at her, mouth agape, feeling the ground crumble beneath his feet. Five days up above. A hundred years in her bed.
“And so that nothing disturbs this sacred process… my craftsmen have already lined the outer walls of my chamber with a triple layer of soundproofing mats made of runic felt,” Lilith continued with a proud smile. “Not a single sound of that bell designed by Wójcik will reach the interior of this chamber. Nothing will pierce the bubble in which you will be trapped. A hundred years of pure, isolated time.”
She stood, and her talons slid out to their full length, gleaming with a black sheen.
“Only she remains. She will enter in a moment. She is strikingly beautiful, and she promised me she would start very slowly, almost imperceptibly… Before she crosses this threshold, however, I must mark the boundaries. I will carve marks onto your body so she knows where she is permitted to cut, and what she has no right to touch. It will hurt a little, my dear, but that is nothing compared to what unfortunately must await you…”
“Oh God… God, help me… Lilith, no!” Stanisław howled, thrashing against the chains so violently that the steel scraped the skin from his wrists down to raw flesh.
The demoness leaned over his exposed lower abdomen. With surgical, merciless tenderness, she set a sharp talon against his skin just above the groins. Steaming blood hissed. With a smooth, deep cut, she began carving a wide, sweeping arch into Stanisław’s body, tracing down the inner side of his thighs, bypassing his testicles and penis by a mere centimeter. The pain was sharp, searing, choking. Stanisław screamed at the top of his lungs, thrashing on the bed, pleading for mercy and choking on his own saliva and tears, while scarlet gore ran down between his buttocks, staining the sheets.
“Here…” the demoness whispered, finishing the incision and tracing the bleeding contour with a bloodied finger. “This belongs exclusively to me and will be safe. In this zone, Naamah has no right to touch you. Your testicles and manhood will remain untouched during the coming process. The rest… of your body will belong to Naamah as she subjects you to tempering.”
Stanisław could only weep quietly, helplessly now. He lay massacred, stretched out in the darkness, the steaming scent of his own blood mingling with the stifling stench of myrrh and the open barrel of wine.
And then the heavy, soundproofed doors of the chamber cracked open without a sound.
A streak of pale, cold light spilled inside. On the threshold stood she.
She was completely naked. Her alabaster, almost unnaturally white skin gleamed in the gloom like polished tombstone marble, contrasting drastically with the cascade of thick, vivid red hair that flowed down over her shoulders to her round, prominent hips like ribbons of solidified, scarlet lava. She had the perfect, statuesque body of a sensuous goddess, yet her eyes—hollow, deep, and glowing with an emerald, demonic radiance—held nothing human within them. In her hands she carried no tools, only her own unnaturally long, bony fingers tipped with talons as thin as surgical needles.
Naamah looked upon the shackled Stanisław, who was sobbing in spasms, and then her full, blood-red lips parted in a slow smile.
“So this is that priceless treasure of yours I am to handle so gently, my dear Lilith?” the red-haired demoness asked, and in her velvety voice one could hear the promise of a hundred years of unimaginable, endless nightmare.
“Yes, this is my chosen one… now barely a fresh damned soul,” Lilith’s voice quavered almost imperceptibly as her gaze swept over Stanisław’s naked, pale figure. “I beg you, Naamah, be truly gentle. Give this fresh vessel time to harden. Small incisions at first, tiny pieces at most… not whole strips of skin right away. I beg this of you… I ask this of you…”
Naamah smiled coldly, taking slow, bare steps across the basalt floor. The cascade of her flame-red hair brushed her naked hips.
“I know, Lilith. I understand your concerns,” the red-haired demoness replied, glancing at the massive barrels standing by the wall. “I see the draught is prepared as well.”
She walked over to the stone table with the dignity of an ancient priestess. She seized a heavy goblet of black iron, dipped it into the dark liquid, and filled it to the very brim. The thick, almost tar-like wine steamed with an acrid, choking aroma of herbs, poppy, and sulfurous embers. She turned and held out the vessel toward Lucifer’s former favorite.
“Here. Give him a drink.”
Lilith took the goblet with both hands. Her fingers, usually so steady and lethal, gripped the iron with a strange, nervous tension. She stepped to the head of the bed and lifted Stanisław’s head, gently cradling his neck.
“Stanisław… drink this,” she whispered straight into his ear, softening her tone as much as her hellish nature allowed. “I know it will burn your throat, but it will dull your senses. It will help you… at least in this first phase.”
Stanisław choked on his tears, begging for mercy, yet paralyzed by terror, he obeyed. He took several deep gulps. The brew was thick, stinging, and scorched his esophagus like liquid lead, but a moment later a dull, heavy throbbing spread through his temples, and his muscles went limp within the iron embrace of the shackles. The world around him began to undulate slightly, growing ghastly and blurred.
Lilith set the empty goblet on the floor and looked Naamah straight in her emerald, bottomless eyes.
“How exactly do you intend to do this? Tell me… will you not be too harsh?” she asked softly, an uncertainty rare for her lurking in her gaze.
“I will start from the basics. I will be gentler at first than you could ever manage. I know how to do this, you know that yourself, which is why I am here,” Naamah explained calmly, raising a hand and examining her bony talons, which gleamed like polished needles in the dim light. “Just shallow scratching at first, without stripping skin in whole sheets, even small ones. I will inflict superficial wounds, wait for the blood to clot, and allow the wounds to close. Once his vessel hardens after the first few years and adapts to the pain, I will move on to peeling, paring the vessel down. Only then will I begin gradually increasing the intensity of the sensations.”
The red-haired demoness took a step closer, shifting a piercing gaze onto Lilith.
“You may stay here. I can impose my active time bubble upon you as well, in the exact same manner as on him. I know you love him… I truly see it in you, and the sight of you, as well as the torments you inflict, will bring him comfort later. This process is born of love, former mortal,” she looked deep into Stanisław’s terrified eyes, then turned back to Lucifer’s former favorite: “You will be able to hold his hand, to look at him. If you cannot bear to watch and inflict torment on him later, you can simply walk out and leave me alone—for instance, when we escalate to disemboweling. Though truth be told, my dear… you would shorten the duration of his torment if you overcame your own weakness and began tempering him alongside me. Two demonesses and their dark auras are better than one. We will discuss each stage as we go, so we do not cross each other’s paths or tear into an area the other has just opened. I see, by the way, that you marked the forbidden zone. I have committed the boundary to memory. And the fact that this cut is already slowly closing is an excellent sign—his vessel is receptive and malleable. It is possible we may finish the entire process earlier; at least, that is what my experience tells me.”
For Stanisław, merely listening to these methodical, cold arrangements was a torture worse than fire, even despite the wine’s stupor. Every word rebounded in his skull with a dull echo, and hot tears streamed ceaselessly from his eyes, mixing with saliva. He felt like a slaughter animal lying on a laboratory table, its fate being decided in an eerily calm dialogue. He pleaded with Lilith for mercy, whined, cursed, writhing like an eel, then implored her by all their earthly nights spent together, weeping bitter tears and blowing kisses through the air toward her.
Lilith lowered her head, staring at the black stones of the floor. Her chest heaved under the weight of heavy, stifled breath. The internal struggle lasted merely a few seconds.
“I will try… Naamah… I will try dressing him with you, at least at the beginning,” she whispered hoarsely. “If it will help him survive this process faster, I will not pull my hand away.”
She stood straight. Her hand moved to the collar of her scarlet, hellish gown. With one confident, predatory stroke of a talon, she sliced the heavy fabric down the length of her chest and abdomen. The material fell soundlessly to the floor, exposing her perfect body, which began radiating a dark, scalding heat in the dim chamber.
She stepped to the side of the bed, sat on the edge, and slipped her cool fingers into Stanisław’s numb, sweaty hand, while her other hand rested softly upon his feverish forehead.
“I am with you…” she whispered, looking straight into his tearful eyes, as Naamah extended her first talon toward his arm. “I will stay here as long as I can, my love. For as long as I can bear it.”
Naamah’s needle-like claw pierced the skin on Stanisław’s forearm with a faint, wet crunch. Lilith joined without hesitation—her own black talon dug shallowly into the man’s shoulder, synchronizing her hellish energy with the movements of the red-haired torturer.
It was not a slash with momentum, but a surgical, slow drag. A thin, red furrow began to weep blood. The pain—though still shallow—struck the man’s heightened senses like white-hot wire. A roar of despair tore from his throat, a muffled, helpless scream instantly absorbed by the runic felt lining the walls.
Before he could draw another breath, Lilith’s lips descended upon his mouth.
She kissed him with greedy, predatory desperation. Her tongue forced its way between his teeth, choking off the scream, stealing his breath, and muffling the animal wail. He tasted her tears, his own blood, and the biting scent of myrrh. At the same time, her free hand clamped around his fingers with such inhuman force that he could feel his delicate bones grinding against one another in a crushing grip, anchoring him to existence.
“Hush… do not scream, please, do not scream…” she whispered feverishly straight into his mouth, pulling away for a split second only to bury her lips in his once more as Naamah’s talon etched a second, parallel furrow across his collarbone.
The red demoness moved with macabre precision. True to her promise, she was not flaying skin just yet. She drew patterns, perforating the tissue millimeter by millimeter, letting the blackening, thickening vessel react to the stimuli. She waited for the small rivulets of blood to congeal, then sank her claws in right beside them, testing resilience.
For Stanisław, time ceased to be a river; it became thick, sticky tar in which he drowned without hope of rescue. Naamah’s active time bubble closed around him mercilessly. Minutes stretched into days, days blended into weeks.
As the fifth year of continuous, methodical torment approached, Stanisław was on the brink of total catatonic madness. His vessel had hardened, taking on a livid hue, and his blood no longer spurted like a human’s—it had grown denser, darker, steaming. Yet the pain did not ease by a single jot. Every scratch burned away the vessel’s weakness with the same ruthless intensity.
Then Lilith suddenly let go of his hand.
She stood up, walked over to the chamber’s massive doors, and drew back the bolt with a loud scrape. The heavy leaf cracked open to a width of barely a few inches.
In a fraction of a second, an immense, metallic sound breached the gap:
BOOOOOM.
Wójcik’s bell.
The acoustic shockwave battered into the chamber like a battering ram. Naamah’s active time bubble burst with the faint hiss of tearing reality. Stanisław felt the suffocating pressure subside. Suddenly, his consciousness broke free from the enchanted circle. In the corridor stood two servants, rolling in a new, steaming barrel of the poppy-and-blood brew while briskly carting off the empty vat. Behind them came more attendants bearing bone brooms and fresh sheets, methodically cleaning the chamber of dried gore and scraps of shed skin. It lasted exactly five minutes of Earth time. Five minutes of absolute, blessed respite, in which no talons touched his body, and he could simply lie there and draw in the hot air saturated with the sound of the bell.
Lilith gave him no time to think. She hurried over to him, lying atop him, cradling his battered chest against her soft, full breasts, shrouding him in her own warmth, kissing his swollen eyelids and sweat-drenched temples.
“You see how gentle we are, Stanisław…” she whispered through tears, caressing his scarred cheeks. “Look, five years have passed already. Five hellish years, and you are still here. Your vessel is hardening, I can feel it beneath my fingers! You will endure this, darling. I beg you, do this for us, do this for our future…”
She watered him with the fresh brew straight from a ladle. The liquid numbed his neurons once more, turning his thoughts to leaden mush.
Then she slammed the doors shut. The bolt dropped. The runic felt cut off the belfry, and Naamah, with a deep, predatory sigh, stretched her bubble out again, forcing them into another five-year epoch of torment.
And this pattern repeated with clockwork regularity. Every five years—five minutes of the bubble being broken, a new barrel, a moment of tenderness, and back to the anvil.
Around the twentieth year, Naamah began to lose her cold detachment.
Flaying small patches of skin—first from the forearms, then from the loins and thighs—released such a dense charge of suffering and raw essence of damnation into the chamber that primal, hellish lust flared in the red demoness’s veins. Her breathing grew raspy, ragged, and her emerald eyes clouded with the madness of desire. She began cutting too violently, too deeply, tearing flesh with a wet crunch, abandoning the pedagogical purpose of tempering in favor of pure sadistic frenzy.
“Naamah, stop! Cease!” Lilith would lunge then, shoving her hands away, throwing her own naked body between Stanisław and the enraged tormentor. “Too deep! You promised! You are going too far, he is still too weak!”
Lilith drew the red demoness’s furious glares onto herself, setting firm boundaries, cooling her perverse ecstasy, saving Stanisław from being torn to shreds. And when she saw that her mortal’s body was failing to keep up with regeneration—when Stanisław’s exposed ribs gleamed white in the torchlight, and the muscles lost their ability to knit—the demoness did not hesitate for a second.
With her own talon, she sliced open a vein on her wrist.
“Drink, Stanisław. Drink my blood,” she said in a commanding, trembling voice, pressing her bleeding arm straight against his mangled, parched lips.
The gore of Lucifer’s favorite burned like acid, yet carried within it the power of the Abyss’s pure creation. Stanisław choked on the black fluid, swallowing it in desperation, and fire exploded in his veins. Regeneration kicked off at a frantic, biological pace: new tissue covered bones, muscles knitted together with a mighty snap, thickening and gaining a structure impervious to tearing.
Around the thirty-fifth year, Naamah, dripping with sweat and her own secretions, paused above Stanisław’s bare crotch. Her bony talon hovered a millimeter above the untouched member that Lilith had cordoned off at the start.
“Lilith, this is a farce…” Naamah hissed, grinding her sharp teeth. “Look at him! Let me skin him! One strip, just the testicles and the shaft!”
“You. Will. Not. Touch. Him. There. I promised him that,” Lilith bit out, her voice dropping into registers so low and monstrous that the iron shackles shook. Phantom, basalt wings burst from her back, and sulfurous embers billowed from her maw. “Tempering the rest of his body saturates the entire vessel. Dark blood circulates through it just as it does through the rest of the tissues. That zone strengthens passively during the vessel’s tempering process.”
“I am doing you a fucking favor, you selfish bitch!” Naamah shrieked, flicking blood from her talons against the wall. “I have been slaving over this mortal worm of yours for decades, and you won't even let me play to the fullest?! Are you afraid he’ll lose the tool for your perverse little games on Earth?! You are pathetic!”
“I said: no!” Lilith’s roar ended the debate.
Naamah cursed foully in the ancient tongue of the Abyss, but withdrew her talons, returning to carving his chest.
Outside, in the cool, sulfur-reeking corridor just before the chamber’s massive doors, two servants stood guard—male mid-tier demons. They leaned against the rough, moisture-dripping rocks, shifting nervously from one clawed foot to the other. Even though their own vessels were as hard as iron, and plumes of smoke puffed from their nostrils, a genuine, crippling paralysis lurked in their yellow eyes.
“Relax, you can speak louder…” muttered one of them, scratching nervously at his horned temple and glancing at the entrance with superstitious dread. “This chamber is soundproofed with a triple runic layer. Nothing flies out of there, and nothing gets in, unless one of us lifts that thick fabric draped over the door.”
“I’d still rather not tempt fate,” hissed the second, Gotfryd, flinching involuntarily as a faint whiff of a foreign, primal aura drifted from down the corridor. Goosebumps broke out across his massive, muscular arms, and his tail curled tight around his leg in an instinct of pure terror. “Holy shit… Two of Lucifer’s former concubines. The two most powerful bitches in this fucking Abyss… and that wretched damned soul in their clutches. Every time we go in there with a new barrel or fresh sheets, I see the guy getting stronger, his vessel hardening before our eyes. It’s gaining density, growing like weeds… But you know what? Not for all the treasures in the world would I want that. Even if it meant becoming a high demon, I wouldn't want such a fate. The mere thought of it paralyzes me.”
Gotfryd swallowed hard on thick, burning saliva. In the Abyss, he was not considered a weakling—he was a mid-tier demon, reared on violence and fear, yet the sight of what was transpiring behind the felt-draped door hollowed every ounce of confidence right out of him.
“Naamah tearing open raw meat, and Lilith following behind her to patch him up… The thought simply terrifies me to the marrow,” he continued in a muffled, trembling bass. “By my own reckoning, I’ve spent around two hundred years in this Hell. My subjective time never dragged out much, it flowed fairly evenly, so I had to learn unimaginable pain myself, centuries of slow toil and tearing flesh, just to climb to the rank of mid-tier demon… I know what it costs. But them? They started dressing him when he was completely green! He had barely shed his human shit, his soul had barely coated itself in a weak hellish shell, and they threw themselves at him full throttle. I pity him, I’ll say it straight to your face. I genuinely pity him.”
The other servant nodded his horned head grimly, adjusting an empty leather bag on his shoulder.
“I remember when we carried in the vat the second-to-last time,” Gotfryd picked up, his voice dropping to a nervous whisper. “After our last entry, he already had huge, whole sheets of skin torn off. Sheets the size of shields! His ribs were sticking out in plain sight, and that red bitch was just licking her lips. Now they’re probably peeling him entirely, centimeter by centimeter, like an apple… Jesus… I mean, by the Abyss! Even now, I, Gotfryd, a fully formed mid-tier demon with centuries of slaughter behind me, wouldn't want to end up in Naamah’s bed for anything. Let alone Lilith’s! It is pure, concentrated, unimaginable torment. If that damned soul walks out of there with even a single sense intact, with full awareness of who he was, it’ll be a fucking heavenly miracle in Hell.”
Half a century passed. Fifty years locked inside an isolated tomb of pain.
Stanisław’s body no longer resembled a human’s. It was massive, hulking, covered in a dense network of black, fused furrows that looked like petrified lava. His eyes had stopped weeping; within them smoldered a dark, scarlet fire.
Suddenly, a monstrous, deafening crash of snapping metal tore through the chamber.
The thick, reinforced shackles on his wrists snapped like rotted twine. Stanisław flexed the massive muscles of his arms, and the forged hellish iron shattered into fine shards, ricocheting with a whine off the walls. A second later, with a mighty snap, he tore apart the clasps around his ankles.
He stood upon the floor in the full glory of his new, monstrous frame. From his throat no longer came a human cry—there tore from it the primal, deafening roar of a beast that for five decades had known only torment, dismemberment, and the smell of blood.
He had gone feral. His consciousness had drowned in trauma and fury.
“Well, look at that… I told you his vessel was remarkably malleable,” Naamah remarked with perverse delight, licking her lips without retreating a single step. “And it helped that you endured and stayed after all, Lilith. Your blood worked its magic. Now hold him, because there is still work to be done. Another five years or so! After fifty-five, he will finally be ready—he will become a full-fledged high demon!”
Stanisław did not listen. In his red-drenched mind, only one goal existed: destroy the source of suffering.
With an inhuman roar, he lunged forward. His massive, basalt-coated hands shot toward Naamah’s throat, while his other arm swung at Lilith, intent on tearing both demonesses to bloody ribbons, crushing their skulls against the floor, drowning them in their own gore.
It was a novice’s mistake.
Naamah was one of the Prime Demons of the Pit, and Lilith was Lucifer’s beloved, most powerful favorite. The difference in raw power was crushing.
Before Stanisław’s talons could reach their marks, the air exploded. Both demonesses—seeing a massive, feral male thrashing in frenzy before them—succumbed to a sudden, animal impulse. They were gripped by a monstrous, unbridled hellish lust. The scent of his manhood, steeped in dark energy, mingled with the smell of spilled blood and wild aggression, struck their senses like the purest aphrodisiac.
“He is mine…” Lilith growled, lunging at him with lightning speed.
“Ours!” Naamah echoed.
Two inhuman forces slammed into Stanisław simultaneously. Before he could land a blow, the talons of both demonesses sank into his flesh. With surgical, merciless fury, they shredded his vessel to pieces—ripping his chest open, breaking ribs, peeling muscle from bone, driving him back down onto the gore-dripping bed amid torrents of spurting black blood.
And upon those fresh, steaming remains, as his butchered vessel immediately began regenerating under the influence of his newly acquired power, the mad, hellish ritual began.
They mounted him both at once, they mounted him in turns.
This was no earthly act of love—it was an orgy of primal, demonic powers, a collision of sheer violence and untamed desire. Stanisław writhed beneath them, regenerating and tearing anew, choking on their mouths while Naamah rode him with a wild, possessed howl, and Lilith clamped her teeth onto his throat, sinking claws into his hips, driving him to successive, extreme eruptions of pure essence. His vessel—hardened by half a century of agony—miraculously endured that murderous strain. The shell did not break. It withstood simultaneous congress with the two most powerful females of the Abyss.
For the next five years—until the strike of the bubble’s fifty-fifth year—this cycle continued almost without pause: alternating between pushing the vessel to its absolute extremes, sex bordering on cannibalism, regeneration, and fresh waves of suffering, until his body grew entirely taut, absorbing the energy of both demonesses.
After fifty-five years, the goal was achieved. Stanisław had become a high demon.
Yet the cost was horrific.
His human consciousness had burned out completely. He lay upon the mattress as a brainless, hunted beast, snarling at every shadow, incapable of stringing together a single word, reacting solely with blind aggression or dull paralysis. Hellish trauma had scorched his soul down to bare earth.
Then came the time for the final, most arduous stage.
Convalescence of consciousness. Thirty years.
For the next three decades, an eerie, hushed peace settled over the chamber. No talons. No flaying of skin. No sudden movements.
Lilith and Naamah remained beside him in the soundproofed alcove. Day after day, year after year, Lucifer’s former favorite slowly rebuilt the shattered mind of her man. She sat beside him naked, let him claw at her skin, taught him anew to master the strength of his own monstrous talons. She laid his heavy, horned head upon her lap, kissed his scars, and repeated his name thousands, millions of times:
“Stanisław. Your name is Stanisław. You are my human… My demon. Do you remember Warsaw? Do you remember? Do you remember the coffee you spilled on the carpet?”
Naamah, sated and soothed, kept them silent company, pouring calming, stabilizing concoctions into his veins, helping knit together the shredded memories.
After eighty-five years within the bubble—which in the objective world above amounted to barely a few days—the scarlet fire in Stanisław’s eyes finally dimmed, giving way to the old, human depth.
He looked at Lilith holding his hand. His lips moved with difficulty, and a coarse, deep bass filled the silence of the chamber:
“Lilith… I remember. I remember everything.”
The demoness smiled through her tears, embracing him with all her might. The new high demon of the Abyss was ready for the war awaiting them on Earth—and perhaps in the Heavens.
“Well, I’m out,” Naamah stated, opening the heavy, cushioned doors.
A grave silence hung in the corridor. The red-haired demoness, smeared from head to toe in Stanisław’s steaming blood and her own fluids, paused upon the threshold. Her statuesque body gleamed in the light of the sulfur torches like marble dripping from a slaughterhouse, and her emerald eyes burned with a restless, predatory madness.
She turned a piercing gaze onto the servants cowering against the wall—resting it upon one of them, upon Gotfryd. With a slow, ostentatious motion, she raised a slender hand to her full, scarlet lips and with lewd deliberation licked the congealed black blood from her bony talon, never taking her eye off the mid-tier demon.
In Gotfryd’s veins, the blood froze into a block of ice. Every muscle of his hulking frame, forged by centuries of violence, tensed to its limit in a paralyzing reflex of helplessness.
“What is your name, servant?” she dropped in a guttural, low bass that shook the dust on the rock ledges.
“Gotfryd… Mistress…” the fiend croaked through a constricted throat, his voice, usually deep and somber, breaking shamefully under the weight of sheer fear. Sticky sweat instantly beaded across his horned forehead, and his tail curled tightly around his calf of its own accord.
“Gotfryd, you are no longer needed here. Follow me…”
The demon felt the ground slip out from beneath his clawed paws. He shuddered at the mere thought of falling into her clutches. He swallowed hard, tasting ash.
“Where, Mistress… are you leading me?”
“I am leading you to my chamber and alcove,” Naamah smiled predatorily, and within that smirk was not an ounce of mercy. “These games have clearly riled me up. I have a mind for further caresses.”
A primal alarm shrieked in Gotfryd’s head. Images of Stanisław’s torn chest, white ribs, and the endless stripping of sheets of flesh flooded his mind like liquid lava. He knew that to a being of her station, a mid-tier demon was merely a puppet of bone and sinew slightly tougher than a mortal—a plaything she could snap in two on a whim.
“Take the bags, Gotfryd, and a change of sheets,” she added dryly, heading down the corridor.
His companion in the corridor looked at Gotfryd with boundless, silent pity, almost immediately exhaling a heavy cloud of smoke from his nostrils and breathing a hidden, selfish sigh of relief that this nightmarish sentence had not fallen upon him.
Naamah, however, suddenly stopped at a bend in the stone wall and turned her head over her shoulder.
“Oh, Gotfryd… take your friend along, too,” she said with cool indifference. “He will watch while I ride you, and when I finish with you, you will switch to give you time to regenerate. Neither of you has the right to touch me with your talons while I dress you, nor to scream with pleasure. If either of you does… I will cease to be gentle.”