18. Dionysus

C all it professional curiosity or me just being like that damned cat, but I was dying to know what Hell was like and have a sit down with Yahweh. I’d been to every realm except for the ones I knew could be hostile and I’d met the majority of living gods.

I couldn’t say they were all completely different from the legends about them, but they were definitely more complex. And people made shit up, too. My father definitely had some consent issues and Hera always blamed the wrong person, but sometimes, people would lie and say Zeus visited them and it was consensual to elevate their standing like they’d been blessed.

My family sired plenty of demigods with mortals, but sometimes, people would claim their children were demigods by one of us and we had nothing to do with it. I had my fair share of orgies, but I only made children when I wanted to and she wanted to. I had been with someone before I met Medusa and we had several children. Sometimes, people got pregnant after one of my orgies and they’d sometimes say it was mine, but it definitely wasn’t.

I always wondered about the gods without parent and sibling drama. I’d met most of them. Some of them were super well adjusted, considering. Others took it really hard when they learned about self actualization. I didn’t know which camp Yahweh was in, but if Lucifer was right and he came here to try to fix things, that was definitely a good sign.

Hell was bracing when we first entered the realm. It was hotter and more humid than any place I’d ever been and my lungs started burning when I took my first breath. It stunk of Sulfur and the air was definitely toxic here. It wouldn’t kill me because I was a god. It would just be super uncomfortable, but it would have killed all my other mates. I guess angels were the only living thing except gods that could survive down here.

I could hear the sounds of people screaming and crying all over the place. As far as realms went, I’d leave this one a negative review on Yelp. It was probably the absolutely worst afterlife realm I’d ever been to. A lot of the afterlife realms had an area where souls who felt like they needed to be punished would go, but most of it was psychological. It sounded like physical torture here and it was terrible.

“Unless you want to be screaming like those souls, we need to check in with the king of this realm.” Lucifer said.

“This is horrible,” Michael said. “Especially now that I know there are people here just because they felt guilty about something that’s not even a sin.”

“This way,” Hades said.

“Who is torturing all those souls if most demons aren’t related to Hell and this pantheon?”

Because they weren’t. Nearly every culture had their own concept of demons. They may have called them by a different name, but the modern translation was demon. Most of the more common types of demons were self actualized before Hell was ever in existence.

The ones that came after were usually associated with this realm instead of Hell, so as far as I knew, there weren’t any demons in Hell who were torturing souls. The only demons I knew of who worked for Satan were crossroads demons and they didn’t possess people or torture them. They just made deals.

“Ah, Satan is hurting for stimulating conversation here,” Lucifer said. “He doesn’t want to talk to the truly evil people. He’s going to want to do the big reveal about his kingdom and if I do it, I’m going to have the devil mad at me. He’s kind of a friend. He enjoys this like you enjoy making people guess who you are. Let him have this.”

I shrugged. I had to wonder. I couldn’t imagine anyone breaking into this place. If they had, they would have died instantly, but there seemed to be some truth in the levels of Hell. We finally got to the right one, and I was about to meet Satan.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Big guy with horns? Little guy with a goatee? Was the ‘red skin’ thing even true? I didn’t think he was a British guy who owned a night club, played the piano, and solved crime, but it would be cool if he was.

When I got into the room, Satan and Yahweh were sitting at a table playing chess. It was much more pleasant in here and that sounded like the punch line to something. Someone had definitely met Satan before because he was a beast of a man with dusky red skin and curling horns.

Gods were a little different. At some point, we stopped aging, but where that point ended up was different for everyone. Some of us looked a little older and wiser than the rest of us. It was generally the one that was deemed king of gods for a particular pantheon because they were supposed to be the smartest. It didn’t always end up that way, but it was supposed to.

You couldn’t believe any of the stories and legends about the various gods unless you heard it straight from them, but I could make a general assessment about the god in front of me. He had kind eyes and a sadness about them. He didn’t seem particularly shocked to see Hades, Hephaestus, or me, but he wasn’t expecting two archangels.

“Lucifer? What are you doing here? Satan says you haven’t been back in ages.”

“We don’t have time for pleasantries. This is Michael, another archangel. You’d know that if you didn’t keep yourself so separate. Your angels didn’t just banish you. They’ve been killing each other in your domain and they set something awful in motion on Earth that innocent supernaturals are getting captured and tortured. There’s been some powerful people who have nearly put a stop to it, but now your wayward children are about to spill their civil war into another realm.”

“They don’t want to hear from me. I messed up with the system I put into place after I messed up with you and the other archangels. Their families died. And then I made another mistake by not immediately addressing it because I was trying to figure out a way to make it better. I don’t know how they banished me, but they had every right to.”

“Um, why are you playing chess with the adversary?” Michael asked.

“Because shit’s fucked and we’re trying to fix it,” Satan said. “It was fun when I thought I was torturing people who did bad things, but now that I know a lot of people ended up here because they felt guilty about not calling their moms, it doesn’t spark joy anymore. I changed how I was doing things.”

“How were you doing things?” I asked.

“Obviously, this is a punishment afterlife. Everyone is given the choice to torture someone or be tortured. If you pick torture because you don’t want to be tortured, then that’s your torture. If you pick it because you’re a sadist and think you’ll enjoy it, then surprise. You’ve got a manager who tells you how to do it and it becomes a job you hate. That’s their torture. The people who opt not to torture anyone is pretty self explanatory.”

“I could see a poetry to that if death didn’t work the way it did,” I said.

“I know, right?” Satan moaned. “I was super proud of that system. I might be the devil, but I’m not evil. My crossroads demons aren’t out there seeking people out to corrupt them. It’s only people looking to make deals. Hey, are you still pretending to be me?”

“It has its benefits,” Lucifer sniffed. “Don’t you judge, either.”

“I wasn’t. Satan and I have been trying to figure out how to get the souls who don’t belong here where they should be. Ideally, I’d like to get the bad people out of my realm, but that isn’t exactly possible.”

“Yes, it is,” Michael said. “There are basically three factions of angels right now. The two fighting against each other and the archangels who are trying to stop it. One faction painted a sigil that banishes gods literally everywhere and the others have no desire to have it removed just yet because they think certain choirs need to be wiped from existence before you come home.

“The archangels have been removing the symbols, but there’s so few of us and some have been looking for you. We got captured before we could erase all of them. We were tortured for centuries. They are doing all of this because they want your attention. Are you killing female archangels?” Michael blurted out.

“No. I’d welcome them. If anyone was hurting archangels, it wasn’t under my orders. As you know, some of the other angels had an agenda that wasn’t mine. What do you need me to do? I can’t exactly show up and say Hi, I’m God, behave. The angels don’t know my face and the humans would think I needed to be medicated. It never works like that in real life.”

If only. We tended to make shit worse when we got involved. We’d all been around long enough to understand people a little better and gain more self awareness. It was why most of us who still lived on this realm flew under the radar.

Yeah, we did a pretty great thing coming together to get the Coalition outlawed, and we wanted the angels to come, but there was probably a whole hot mess of things we’d set in motion. We needed Yahweh to rein in the angels, but I definitely didn’t want to trot him out and have him tell everyone to leave supernaturals alone. I just knew that would go ass up. We had him, but we didn’t actually have a plan.

“I was held captive with the faction of angels who set the humans on the supernaturals. They literally started that because they thought wherever you ended up, it would get your attention. I don’t think anyone would have guessed you were going to end up playing chess with the adversary to figure out how to fix the system and didn’t know about any of this. I don’t think you should appear to the mortals and they never actually said what they would do when they saw you again, but they hurt countless innocents to force you to make yourself known. The least you could do is respond,” Michael said.

“Yes. I can and should do that, but you should know that if all the angels are mad at me, the civil war could spill onto Earth and I can’t exactly bring it back home with that sigil.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Lucifer said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a power you were self actualized with and have always hated using.”

“You want me to smite them.”

Lucifer just shrugged.

“Just the mouthy ones. The rest of them will fall in line. They are doing this shit because they aren’t properly scared of you.”

“You were a mouthy, little shit who rebelled and started a civil war and I didn’t smite you.”

“That’s because deep down, you knew I was right. I asked for the same rights as people on Earth and you refused. When I got banished, I never twisted your message to turn humans against innocents. All I did was enjoy myself and capitalize on the villain you let them turn me into. Please tell me you see how what they did was worse.”

I mean, Lucifer had a point. He was a dick most of the time and relished the whole ‘fallen angel’ thing. When he was pretending to be Satan, he traded in favors, not souls. Like, he’d do something for someone and usually got a nice house or a new yacht out of it. He was also a pretty big patron of the arts. He’d get people in front of galleries, recording studios, ballet companies, or casting directors in exchange for art work or tickets.

But he never twisted any religious message or tried to turn people against his father. If anyone asked, he never badmouthed him that much, either. And he could have. I personally wouldn’t have blamed him if he wanted to clear the air that he wasn’t the bad guy in the whole situation.

“Yes, I’m not stupid, Lucifer and I’ve changed a lot since the last time I saw you. I’ve changed a lot since I was banished, too. This needs to stop in both realms. Smiting is a terrible power and if I have to use it, I will.”

Yeah, smiting was a terrible power, but it was also kind of cool if you didn’t abuse it like Zeus and his lightning bolts. We still didn’t have much in the way of a plan, but we’d located a missing god, so we had enough to formulate one.