The transition from life to the void is rarely the serene drifting into light promised by the poets. For Marianne Thornveil, it was a plunge into the cold, digital judgment of five million strangers before the final, crimson silence.
Most people cling to the comfort of a binary afterlife: a golden city for the virtuous and a lake of fire for the damned. They believe the destination is earned by the deeds of the flesh, a cosmic ledger balanced at the moment of the final breath. But as Marianne stood before the glowing eye of her smartphone, the darkness of the room pressing against her like a physical weight, she knew the truth. She was ready to confess to a world that loathed her—to explain that she had already traversed the geography of the damned.
Her hands were slick, stained to the wrists in a deep, viscous red that dripped onto the mountain of limbs behind her. They were a tapestry of the dead, corpses stacked like cordwood.
She knelt, her knees hitting the floor with a wet thud, and adjusted the camera to ensure her face—the face of a porcelain doll—was perfectly framed. With a detached, clinical grace, she separated the bodies, dragging them into the light of the lens. "See this?" she whispered, her voice a serrated blade. "This is my mother. My birth mother. I killed her myself." She reached for another, lifting the slack, grey face of a man. "And this... he's my dad. Also dead by my hands."
The livestream was a frantic blur of scrolling hate. The world was screaming through their keyboards, a digital lynch mob calling for her soul. 'You're no human, just a devil in an angel's clothing.' 'They're coming for you. Prepare to experience true hell.' 'May God have mercy on you, because we won't.' 'You're just a pretty face with a devil's soul.'
Marianne watched the comments flicker by, a strobe light of condemnation. She paid them no mind. She pointed to the final two: a teenage boy and girl, their eyes frozen in the dull surprise of the murdered. "These are my siblings. Those imbeciles." She leaned closer to the camera, her eyes wide and hauntingly bright. "You wish me dead. You say I shall go to hell. But look around. Which other hell exists but this earth? Death isn't my punishment; it's my redemption. I'll redeem myself through the blade."
She called herself the "Devil Killer," a title that had haunted the nation's nightmares for months. With a final, chilling smile, she picked up a blood-caked knife. In one fluid motion, she slit her throat. A single, crystalline tear escaped her left eye, rolling down her cheek to mingle with the gore before she collapsed.
When the police finally breached the door, they found only a mausoleum. The case was closed, but the mystery of the "Devil Killer" only grew. How could the President's daughter-in-law—the woman who graced charity galas and kissed babies—be the same monster who burned children alive in an orphanage and spent a week dismembering a school principal? She had been a ghost in black robes, a gloved phantom on a screen, until she chose to tear off the mask and end the show.
In the Drustin household, the television hummed with the same grim reportage. Cael Drustin sat paralyzed on the couch, mesmerized by the image of the woman who had terrorized his country.
"The Devil Killer's news has hit the entire nation..." the reporter began, but the screen went black. His mother stood over him, the remote clutched in her hand like a weapon.
"Mom! Don't be like this!" Cael snapped.
"Enough, Cael! Why are you so obsessed with this monster?" Mrs. Drustin's voice trembled with a mixture of grief and rage.
"I'm just trying to understand her," Cael said softly, his eyes reflecting the empty screen.
"What is there to understand about a sinner? She is pure evil."
"Sinners can be forgiven," Cael argued, his voice rising with a strange, desperate conviction. "Jesus associated with sinners. He saw the humanity in the broken."
"That's up to God! You are not God!" She was shaking now.
"She didn't look like a bad person to me, Mom. I could see her eyes in that final stream. She isn't what everyone thinks. Beneath it all, I think she had a pure soul."
The air in the room turned frigid. Mrs. Drustin's hand flew up, stopping just short of his face. "You've forgotten," she sobbed, the tears finally breaking through. "You've forgotten she killed your brother. She took him from us!" She pointed a trembling finger at the door. "Get out. Get out of my sight!"
Cael left dejectedly, the weight of his mother's grief pressing into his spine. He stepped out into the street, his mind still filled with Marianne's haunting eyes. He didn't see the car. He didn't hear the screech of tires. In an instant, the last of the Drustin lineage was extinguished. Driven to the brink by the loss of her final child, Mrs. Drustin followed him into the dark, leaping from the roof of their apartment building into the cold embrace of the pavement.
Marianne woke up, but not to the fire she had been promised.
She opened her eyes to a horizon that stretched forever, a scorched, desolate expanse reminiscent of a sun-bleached Sahara. It was crowded. Hundreds of people stood or lay in the sand, looking like the survivors of a catastrophic war. They were mangled, missing limbs, or sporting horrific gashes, yet there was no blood. The wounds were fresh, raw, and pink, but the life-fluid seemed frozen or absent.
Marianne looked at her own hands. The blood from the room was still there, but it had dried into a stiff, brown crust. Her throat felt the phantom sting of the knife, the wound open and gaping, yet silent.
Suddenly, a voice boomed from the vast, colorless sky—a sound that didn't travel through the air but vibrated directly inside their skulls.
"Welcome to the afterlife. Proceed to the staircase ahead. It leads to the High Court."
The crowd erupted in a low, panicked murmur.
"Is that God?" someone shouted. "I doubt it," replied a man missing a left arm. "My life on earth wouldn't earn me a conversation with the Almighty."
As he spoke, a thunderous crack echoed through the void. A massive, crystalline staircase manifested out of the ether, ascending into the clouds. It had no handrails, no support—just a jagged path upward into the infinite.
"Those with missing parts, stay behind," the voice commanded. "Your property will be delivered to you."
Marianne watched as a man missing his lower half—Robert—watched a man split vertically down the middle crawl past him.
"Why bother crawling?" Robert teased. "They said our parts are coming. Relax."
The 'Crawler' didn't stop. "And will they be attached, or do we have to carry them? I'd rather start moving now than be stuck here forever."
Robert's smirk faded. He hadn't thought of that. "Hey, I'm Robert. What's your name?"
"Leave me alone," the Crawler hissed.
"Fine. I'll just call you Crawler. We're going to be here a long time."
"No friends in hell," the Crawler retorted.
"You think this is hell?" Robert asked, looking around at the sterile, silent desert.
Before he could answer, a legion of figures descended from the sky. They looked like angels, but their wings were the color of midnight and they wore tactical black robes. They carried heavy, metallic boxes.
The soldiers began distributing the contents. Robert gasped as a severed leg was dropped in front of him. Inscribed on the flesh in a glowing, angry red ink was a series of numbers: 1463211: 15:02.
"It's a tattoo," Marianne whispered, looking at her own arm where a number was beginning to itch into existence. 1701256: 15:02.
The voice returned, colder this time. "Everyone must carry their own parts to the High Court. No assistance is permitted. If you cannot carry yourself, you will remain until you can."
The desert erupted in cries of despair. A girl with no arms stared at her severed limbs lying in the sand. "How? How am I supposed to carry my hands without hands?"
The crowd, filled with the bitterest souls of earth, didn't offer sympathy. They laughed.
"What do you expect?" a severed head sitting in a box mocked. "This is the afterlife. I have to carry my own brain."
"You're lucky," a young man said, pointing to a woman who had been blown into a dozen pieces. "How is she going to climb?"
The laughter grew louder, a chorus of the damned. Marianne looked at the staircase, then at her blood-stained hands. The earth had been a hell of her own making, but as she looked at the impossible climb ahead, she realized the afterlife was something far more systematic. It wasn't fire. It was the heavy, literal weight of one's own remains.