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It seemed hopeless to scream into the void, but it was all I could think to do. I waited, ear pressed up against the cold stone, until I heard the voice again. Yes! There it was again, closer than it had ever been. I couldn’t understand what it was saying, or even who was speaking, but there was definitely someone there, just on the other side.
“Please help me!” I yelled, banging on the stone wall with my hand, “I don’t know how to get out of here!”
Something happened, then, that I hadn’t expected.
A chunk of the rock wall I had banged against… fell off. It dropped to the ashen ground underneath me with a dull thud, sending up a small puff of dust as it did. Dumbfounded, I stared at the rock, shone my Light against it, picked it up, turned it around in my hands—it was small, barely a few inches thick. It would have been unremarkable if it hadn’t just come from the walls of the Pit.
I was pretty sure I didn’t have the strength to break solid rock with my fists.
I felt around the rock wall again, running my fingers into the groove the rock had broken off from. I picked at its jagged edges with my fingernails, and as much as I couldn’t believe it, small rock shavings were coming off the wall.
I heard the muffled voice on the other side speak once more, this time directly at me.
Dig, it said.
Dig? Into the stone wall? With what?
I looked around and grabbed the first piece of bone I could see, slamming it against the wall like a makeshift pickaxe. The first two strikes seemed to have no effect on the stone, and on the third, the bone shattered in my hands.
I tried several more pieces with the same result before tentatively approaching Medrion’s corpse and carefully removing a piece of his armor. His pauldrons were curved and seemed the perfect shape for digging, but they smashed and crumpled like paper as soon as I hit the wall.
Running out of options, I ran my fingertips along the stony wall again, looking for places to pick at with my nails. I couldn’t believe what was happening—parts of the rock face were coming off in little flecks that floated harmlessly to the ground. Curious, I placed my hands against the stone wall, sliding my fingernails into whatever crevices and cracks I could find.
I then pulled, scraping my nails along the rock wall.
Wincing from a sudden bite of pain, I pulled my hands away from the wall. There was blood on my fingertip, a jagged line of broken skin just under my fingernail. I thumbed it off, smearing the blood along my purple-stained finger and continued to dig into the wall.
It shouldn’t have been possible for me to remove parts of this cavernous wall with my bare hands, but as I dragged my fingers down the rock, more and more pieces of it were coming off. It was as if the rock was suddenly soft, instead of solid. Not quite like raking my hands through dirt though, it was more like dragging through gravel and broken glass.
I could feel the rock giving way as I bore into it, and that made me start moving faster. After a few moments, I was hacking at the rock with my hands, taking giant pieces out of it and making something that looked like a tunnel. But then I felt pain again, sharp and sudden. I retreated, pulling away from the wall and staring at my hands.
They were bleeding, my hands covered in lacerations that weren’t just surface deep. Blood dribbled down my forearms, my nails starting to come up from their beds.
I stared at my bleeding hands, trembling, panting. Shutting my eyes, I channeled some of my Light into the wounds. The warmth soothed the pain, allowing me a moment to recover from it. When I opened my eyes, the cuts were mostly gone and my nails had rejoined the skin, but the blood remained—as did the makings of the tunnel I had just tried to dig into the wall of the Pit.
I had no way of knowing how thick the wall was, no way of knowing how far I would have to dig or if this was going to happen every time I stuck my hands into the wall. What I knew with certainty, though, was that I had just used up more of my remaining Light.
Maybe this was another trick, another way to get me to spend myself so I would end up like the skeletons all around me. I could either resign myself to eventually suffocating, or starving, or dying of dehydration—or worse, none of those things ever happening.
Or I could take my chances with the wall.
Going up isn’t an option, I thought to myself.
I’ll have to go through.
I moved up against the wall again and considered it carefully; I didn’t know how deep I had to go, but I did know how wide it would have to be for me to squeeze myself through—that, at least, would save me some energy and Light.
Seeing as all I had was time, I dug slowly, checking my hands for signs of damage as often as I could. It wasn’t easy. Some parts of the wall required more work than others, and those were the ones that left wounds for me to heal.
I couldn’t heal them all. Or, I could, but I chose not to.
I chose instead to stand the pain, to work through it instead of using my Light to seal the wounds and stop the bleeding. Wherever this path was taking me, wherever this tunnel I was digging into the wall let out, it was not Heaven. I had a feeling, deep down in the pit of my stomach, that I knew where I was going, and—it wasn’t a place I’d ever wanted to step foot in.
But Lucifer was free.
I could only hope Abaddon was still alive.
And I had made a promise to help those lost souls in Heaven, not to mention all the angels trapped on Earth.
