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watched his creations destroy each other. But that pain was a kind of blank. No soul, not even hers, could bear the pain of God. She did bear it, but she didn’t know she was bearing it, and she did not remember it. It marked her in ways that were hidden forever.
    Some of the agonies she suffered were not gigantic, but still were beyond her understanding. Not being human, she hadn’t known what it would be like to see her family die, to lose belief that God existed, to know that cherished dreams could no longer be fulfilled in the short time left to her. And even now, she lived through that psychological torture without knowing exactly what it was. She knew it was human, that was all. That she, the Queen of Hell, was suffering as countless humans had done, but without end.
    And then sanity would come again, and once more Nyx would struggle to break free. Because she was Queen of Hell, and she would be revenged against Lucifer, who had been her lieutenant, and Tribunal, who was the Son of God. The two of them together had done this to her.
    Again and again and again she came to herself and struggled and fought and screamed silent screams through burned-away vocal cords and lungs. And again and again she fell back into the madness until her body could, again, rally enough to heal itself.
    And because this was Hell, where nothing could die, Nyx knew that the torture could last longer than time itself. It could, and would, go on for eternity if Lucifer wanted it to. And so she struggled and fought, trying to find a way to escape.
    Until one time, sanity came, and Nyx no longer had the will to struggle.
    She could not heal her body. She could not break the box that held her. She could not escape the Hellfire. No matter how hard she tried, she would only break again and sink into insanity. So this time, instead of fighting it, she was utterly still until the Hellfire once more took control of her body and mind, and her sanity disappeared under the weight of all the violence she had done to others.
    A hundred times she lay quiescent through the cycle of pain and madness and sanity before a new idea came to her.
    It did not come fully formed. It came as a tenuous thread of thought, which she clung to in the maelstrom of pain and anguish that the Hellfire inflicted on her mind.
    Another hundred cycles of pain came and went.
    And when Nyx once more rose to sanity, instead of struggling, she poured all her power into the Hellstone box that was crushing her body.
    Hellstone was not a natural substance, carved from the rocks of Hell. Rather, it was made by torturing fallen souls until all their humanity, all sense of self and physicality, vanished, until they were reduced to a hard, black stone that could be molded and shaped as the Descended wished. Inside the stone, the soul suffered unending torments, and this unimaginable suffering increased further when it was reshaped to suit the Descended’s needs.
    From these broken and battered souls, Nyx had decorated her castle. She had made devices and weapons and instruments of torture. So had every other Angel. And when an Angel got bored, he or she would heal the damaged souls within the Hellstone, restoring the flesh that clothed their souls in Hell and returning them to a physical form—sometimes perfect in its parts, completely healed—that could be tormented down to Hellstone again.
    And so, when sanity came again, Nyx poured her power into the Hellstone box, directing it into the stone beside one of the many slits that let the Hellfire seep inside. She channeled all of it into a single soul that had been tortured down to stone, then twisted and bent to the shape Lucifer had wanted. Every bit of strength she had went into that soul, and just before the Hellfire overwhelmed her, she saw him changing from Hellstone back to flesh.
    The soul had been a man. He had killed for money and raped for pleasure. He had murdered his own children for food. And though, as Queen of Hell, she was