The heat wasn't an external force; it was a physical law, a final, unyielding weight pressing down on Ethan's lungs.
The wreck of the minivan was a black, smoking fist of twisted metal, but the true enemy was the fire. It lived, breathed, and screamed with a chemical appetite.
Ethan Vale braced his left foot on the shattered dash and drove his shoulder into the rear passenger door. One last heave. He was a paramedic, not a firefighter, and his suit was smoking. The interior smelled of singed hair, cheap plastic, and a metallic tang that tasted like fear.
"Hold still, kid!" he rasped, his voice shredded by smoke.
He could see the girl, Seraphina, no older than seven, trapped by the crumpling frame. Her eyes were wide, reflecting the orange hell-glow. She didn't scream; she only whimpered, a small sound that broke his heart more than any wail could.
He finally tore the door enough to create a jagged, impossible gap. His arms were lacerated, his skin tight with painful blisters, but the adrenaline had cauterised all sensation. He lunged, gripping her small arm, and pulled.
A shriek of grinding metal overhead made the decision. The engine block, torn loose from its mounts, started to tip. It was going to crush the only exit.
He shoved her. Hard. "Run! Don't stop!"
He saw her face a terrified, tear-streaked canvas of innocence as she stumbled out onto the asphalt just as the main roof support gave way. The twisted column of steel swung down, faster than thought, a wrecking ball of fatal physics.
Not the little girl.
Ethan threw his arms over his head in a futile gesture of self-preservation that he knew was going to fail. The pain was not a sharp, precise thing. It was an absolute obliteration a deafening, silent explosion of bone, heat, and crushing gravity that wiped out the concept of Ethan Vale entirely.
The last sensation was the smell of ozone and burnt flesh, followed by a total, perfect darkness.
He had died, and he had done the right thing. He'd saved the child.
So why, when he woke up, did he still feel the heat?
The first breath was the most terrifying. It wasn't the shallow, painful gasp he expected. It was a deep, impossible draught of air that tasted of sulfur and burnt copper, and it didn't fill his lungs. It filled something deeper, a vast, hollow space beneath his sternum.
He opened his eyes.
Instead of the comforting white of a hospital ceiling or the eternal, cold quiet of the grave, he saw… a perfect nothing.
It wasn't an absence of light; it was an absence of space. He floated in a boundless, pitch-black void, but it felt pressurised, like the ocean floor. Every direction exerted a crushing, abyssal pressure, and every sound was a distant, internal roar.
His body, the thing he instinctively felt his consciousness resided in was intact. No crushed bones, no burns, no smoke-choked lungs. But that didn't mean he was well.
He was on fire.
Not the cleansing fire of the mortal world, which consumes and reduces, but a spiritual, internal flame that fed on the air around him and glowed with the furious, impossible colour of a collapsing star.
It radiated from a single point on his chest a mark he could feel but not see and sent trails of infernal energy across his skin like rivers of molten glass. When he looked at his hands, they weren't his. They were the translucent, skeletal structure of his own, sheathed in a crackling red aura.
"A hallucination," he croaked, but the word was dead on his tongue.
He tried to stand, but there was no floor. He kicked, and the movement sent a ripple of Wrath-energy he didn't know the word, but he felt the domain through the void, illuminating his immediate surroundings in an angry, pulsing red.
He was alone. Condemned.
Panic, cold and visceral, finally broke through the impossible heat. He had died saving a child. He was selfless. He had earned his rest.
This is not my end.
He tried to summon a memory the girl's face, the flash of the crushed metal, the white light of the ambulance he'd worked in. Anything to tether himself back to the world of reason.
Instead, a torrent of images that were not his own slammed into his mind. They were brief, brutal flashes of sin:
A financier in a clean suit, his lips curled in a smug smile, destroying a thousand families with a single signature.
A priest, hands clasped in piety, his eyes fixed on the collection plate, hoarding what was meant for the poor.
A young lover, whispering false promises into the ear of the one she was about to betray.
They were red echoes. Sin Perception.
The sigil on his chest that glowing, impossible brand flared violently, and the visions retreated, leaving him shaking with an entirely spiritual nausea.
"What is this?" he whispered, but the abyss merely drank the sound.
This wasn't the Hell of the comic books or the fire-and-brimstone sermons. That Hell was messy, chaotic, and loud. This was a Hell of perfect, cold, agonizing order. A processing chamber. A place designed to reduce a soul to its component parts, to expose the lie beneath the sacrifice.
He had expected judgment. He had expected to be weighed, to be found worthy. Instead, he was simply… fuel.
The realisation hit him like another collapsing engine block: he hadn't been admitted to Heaven because of his selfless act; he had been rerouted here because of it. His soul, for some reason, had been deemed too stained, his humanity too flawed, his self-sacrifice nothing more than a desperate attempt to atone for a sin he couldn't name.
He felt the infernal fire grow brighter, consuming his self-doubt. The fire felt like home. That twisted, forbidden comfort was the most damning thing of all.
I don't belong here.
He screamed, a raw, animal sound driven by pure, unadulterated fury. It wasn't noise; it was energy. It flew into the void, turning into a pulse of pure, spiritual Hellfire Dominion that carved a path through the darkness. The flame was a physical representation of his Wrath not the petty, mortal anger of a traffic jam, but the profound rage of a good man betrayed by the universe itself.
The flame died down, leaving him exhausted, floating, and utterly broken.
Then, from the infinite darkness, a voice liquid, cold, and as old as time itself spoke directly into the hollow space in his chest. It didn't use his ears. It used his guilt.
"They said your soul was tainted, Ethan Vale. They said your service was a lie, and your sacrifice, merely an act of desperation."
Ethan's body seized up. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, could only feel the sigil on his chest burning brighter, like a brand on the soul.
The source of the voice finally materialised not a physical being, but a shifting shadow of pure, elegant darkness that coalesced into the form of a man. His features were beautiful, sharp, and entirely cold, and his eyes were twin voids that saw not Ethan, but the blueprints of his soul. Lucien.
"A travesty of justice," the Lord of the Ninth Gate said, his voice a silken invitation into damnation. "Serve me, and live again."