All his talk, and what did it mean to her? Not much, really. He hadn't agreed to come quietly, not really, anyway, so what did anything else matter? If anything, his babbling was a little bit amusing. He was still trying to treat her like another of these surface creatures. Did he truly believe she was nothing more than a crazed human? He had to be an absolute idiot. Her bearer this time around was an absolute idiot.

He was trying to leave. The fire didn't scare him anymore. Of course, he knew the flames wouldn't hurt him much. She understood. But that still wasn't acceptable. She was done playing around. When he began stepping outside her ring of flames, she cast her hand out, like she had before, with a disturbingly gentle smile on her face.

A tremor shook the small convenience store. The ground beneath his feet rocked. A deep bass-like sound came up from the floor. With the sound came the first crack in the tiles. From under them both, the floor began to split, cracking like ice on a lake. The debris covering the floor began to fall away and the roof above their heads began to splinter. The fluorescent lights snapped and sparked, the pipes burst, and the plaster began to fall. Everything in the store fell towards the sinkhole that had formed before everyone's eyes. And the empress just watched, calm and controlled, with the assurance that it was all over for him. No more talking pointlessly. Just fall, and she'd join him momentarily.

Upon the first tremble, Alexander spread his legs and crouched to keep from falling over. He could hear shouts of alarm outside. Then the floor lurched in a sharp downward slope, Alexander falling over anyway. It splintered and cracked and bent and sagged as the earth and concrete and plywood and tile splintered and crumbled away at the center into a gaping hole.

Alexander felt himself start to slide towards this hole as it widened. Instinctively, he reached out to grab the nearest stable object, the window frame, except it was lined with jagged glass from the broken window. He jerked his hand away, the palm sliced open, and flailed frantically for something else as he began to slide feet first into the hole, the broken shelves and all their contents already tumbling down the abyss.

There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to save him. His hand left a streak of blood that quickly ended when the hand healed. Alexander tumbled into the hole... and grabbed onto some piping at the edge of the hole like a stubborn root.

He dangled there as the pipe began to sag, unable to support his weight, and Alexander stared with wide, frightened eyes at the woman so stoically watching his demise. He realized that she wasn't crazy at all, or perhaps she was so insane that she could manifest any crazy desire as truth. Either way, he had severely underestimated her and what she was all about.

He glanced down at the hole, no bottom in sight, and it occurred to him that perhaps he was already dead. Perhaps he hadn't survived that car crash after all and this was his twisted introduction to Hell.

"This can't be happening," he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut, hoping that maybe this was all just a horrible nightmare instead. "This can't be happening, this can't be happening, this can't be--"

The pipe suddenly bent in a horrifying downward angle, Alexander unable to keep his grip. He felt the instant rush of falling, his stomach and heart rising up to his throat in the terror that he was tumbling to his death. He cried out, too frightened to truly scream, then gasped for breath as the light above him shrank to a pinpoint before darkness swallowed it. All he could feel was the rush of air around him as he fell, all he saw was darkness. It terrified him that he wouldn't even be able to see the bottom of this hole rush up to meet him, that he wouldn't even be able to anticipate the exact moment of his death, if he was even still alive. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and tensed, waiting for the impact....

There was no impact.

He would jerk awake soon, after some time impossible to distinguish. He would awake in a massive room with ceilings seemingly as far away as the sky, with black pillars reaching up and masses of jagged red glass hanging down like fireballs ready to fall. He would awake in a wooden chair, his arms bound down by leather straps. And he would awake with a few inhuman creatures around him. To his side stood a slender creature clad in dark armor, their face covered and with daggers hanging from their belt. In front of him stood the masculine one with face like cracked stone. And next to the masculine thing, sat the white woman from a moment before. She sat before him, leaning to the side, her legs crossed, in a throne of obsidian and red opal. A black cloak lay around her shoulders and her body, flowing about her like tar. She watched her bearer as he awoke, calm, collected, assured.

"He's awakening, your highness," said the stone-faced creature beside her.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" she said with soft amusement. "It thought I was some surface creature gone mad, can you imagine that?

"Very foolish, my liege."

"Yes, I know. It was an interesting change of pace, though, very amusing." She smiled at the man in the chair before her. "Get up."

Flickers of light cut like daggers through his consciousness. Warbles of sound shook the rest of his senses. Alexander groaned and opened his eyes, then winced from the pounding headache he had invited in by waking up. He hadn't remembered how he passed out during his descent into...into...

Where was he?

The pain in his head was too intense for this to possibly be a dream, yet the room was like nothing he had ever seen, which was saying a lot for being a Vegas resident. And the strange creatures... Alexander squinted through the pain to try to make out their features. They looked disturbingly real, yet that was impossible...but the way they moved, the way they smelled...somehow, he could not fathom these creatures to just be men in heavy stage makeup and costume.

He must be going crazy.

That's when he spotted her, the woman from before, beautiful and powerful and frightening and sinister on her chair--no, her throne. Seeing her instilled in him both anger and fear. Where the hell was he?

Alexander shifted his body and realized that he was strapped to a chair. He jerked and strained his arms against the bindings, but they held fast. He panicked.

"What the fuck is this?" he choked out. He turned his head to look around, his spiking bewilderment causing the room to spin a little. "Where in hell am I? What happened?"

He snarled when the woman commanded him to rise, and he pulled at his bonds. "Does it look like I can get up?" he spat, wanting to pull his gaze away from the woman but unable to keep from glaring straight at her.

No one around him was impressed at his outburst, least of all the creature on the throne. The creature next to the throne barely blinked, and the armored one next to the chair didn't move. "Get up, awaken, whatever," the one on the throne said casually. He was glaring at her with fear and fury in his lovely blue-green eyes, and she met his gaze with an unfazed smile. Most of the bearers reacted in a similar fashion. This one had made a few interesting remarks here and there, but all in all, he was very much playing by her rules, filling his usual role.

"Where in hell you are..." She pursed her lips, musing over his words for a second. "I believe you answered your own question right there. That's what some of you surface creatures call this place. And this place? It's mine. All mine."

This was absolutely her favorite part of the little speech she got to give to her new arrivals. She grinned at him, perhaps unbearably smug for him. "My name is Lilith. You are the millennium bearer of the Light. And you are going to be my guest for a while. Or my prisoner. It's up to you."

Seeing the smug look on everyone's faces only frightened and infuriated Alexander more. These creatures near the woman looked like the stuff of nightmares. This place wasn't anything he could even imagine on his own. And the way this bitch talked to her...

Answered his own question? His mind reeling, Alexander retraced his words. What the fuck was she--

Oh.

All color drained from his face.

"I really have died and gone to Hell," he whispered, anger leaving him. He began to tremble as he glanced around. The strangeness of the place made much more sense knowing that he was in Hell, but... "I thought there would be more...fire," he said weakly as he felt his stomach begin to churn. It was all he could do to keep from vomiting on his lap, realizing with dismay that he could still vomit in Hell, and know real despair. Well, of course. "A-and I thought the ruler of this place was a man. Lucifer, not Lilith." Why couldn't he shut up? It wasn't like him to talk on and on like this, normally the quiet one in the room. However, he had no other defense or way to cope at this point than through words, considering that he was strapped to the chair and at the mercy of these hellish creatures. "Though Lilith was a demon, if I recall..." He struggled to grasp the details of what he could remember about the character Lilith, unable to even process her mention of this millennium-light-bearer-whatever. He'd be less dense if not for the fact that he was still trying to cope with the reality that he was in Hell.

"If that's what you choose to believe." Most of what he said was a little true, a little not. It wouldn't benefit her much to correct every little thing he said. He was struggling and babbling anyway. She inhaled sharply, with him rattling off this misconception and that. The surface creatures were woefully out of date, it seemed. "The only piece of advice I will give you is this. Forget everything you thought you knew about this place." It was in her best interest for him to be at least a little calm, if only for ease in moving him around and to irritate her less. Sometimes they just didn't stop screaming, and when she wasn't actually doing anything to facilitate screaming, it was just annoying.

"Put the gauntlets on him," she ordered. The slender thing beside his chair picked something up from a small wooden chest on the floor. They resembled mittens crafted of leather, but stiff. The slender creature silently grabbed his right hand and slipped the first one on. His fingers would no longer be able to move independently of one another, but they weren't particularly uncomfortable. Any discomfort might have come from how tight the guard was pulling them around his wrists.

All the while, Lilith rose from her throne and took a few steps forward, crossing her arms with a stern frown. Perhaps she looked frightening, but this part truly was just business. There were things the empress did benefit from him knowing. "Listen. This is how everything is going to work. If you choose to believe all your surface legends, you probably think I'm about to spear you on an iron spit, but that's not how I do things. I bear you no ill will. I have nothing to gain from torturing you for the sake of pleasure. I will torture you if you irritate me. If you irritate me, you will be treated as a prisoner. If you behave yourself, you will be treated as a guest. How much pain you endure is completely in your hands." She glanced down at his hands, now secured in leather, and snickered at her own joke. "Do I make myself completely clear?"

Of course, Alexander struggled when his hand was seized, but the creature's grip was like iron, unyielding, like him trying to pull at a steel post that would not budge. He winced as his hand disappeared inside the strange mitt, expecting his fingers to be shoved into needles or dipped in acid or assaulted by the painful, poisonous stings of a thousand ants from Africa like in that documentary he had seen recently while bored and down on his luck at home...

OK, his imagination was getting the best of him, but it was impossible not to think the of outrageous, the outlandish, and the positively crazy when he was in a place such as this.

It was almost worse that no pain accompanied the imprisonment of his hands, as though this small act of mercy meant he would endure much more in the near future.

Still, Lilith wasn't being entirely unreasonable. She and her minions hadn't hurt him yet. If this was Hell, Afghanistan had been something far, far worse...

He blinked, realizing how lucid he was being. Something like this should have more than triggered his PTSD by now. He should be beside himself in anxiety, delirious in stress, and completely overtaken by the lingering emotions of that terrible past, yet here he was, considering the words of a demon in this strange place where no one would save him.

No one had bothered to save him at home when they had access to. Alexander realized that if he was going to escape this place and live to tell about it, he had to save himself. That meant he needed information.

He turned and faced Lilith directly, legs shoulder-width apart, arms in front, back straight, chin up, gaze direct, though he really wanted to piss his pants in fear of how crazy and risky and dangerous this all was. "Clear enough, I guess," he said in response to her question. "You said you needed me for something." He could not entirely shake the fear in his voice, though he made a valiant effort. He tossed his head in an attempt to move the hair out of his eyes. "What is it?" By the life of him, he couldn't remember every detail of her ramblings up in the surface, the whole ordeal one big, bizarre blur. "Are there others like me down here, too?" More questions threatened to tumble out of him, but he bit his tongue, holding back. He needed to be patient. Besides, Lilith wasn't really good at answering questions thus far, in his opinion.

"No." Oh, look at that, he was trying to act tough, similarly to a few moments on the surface, even when strapped down to a chair. There were none else like him down here... well, at least not anymore. In response to his other question, about what she captured him for, Lilith met his gaze head on, tilting her head, looking at him like he was crazy. "I don't want to tell you," she said, blunt as a hammer. "It doesn't benefit me to tell you." If nothing else, she was honest, at least so it seemed. So far she hadn't said anything that came across as an outright lie. "I've told you all that is necessary for you to know. You will remain in my custody until the time is right."

She turned away from his chair. "I'm finished now. Norea, take him away at your leisure."

The empress began to stride off towards massive doors opposite her throne, and the stone-faced thing by the throne began to follow at a respectful distance. The petite creature by Alexander's chair began to take the restraints off the chair, but he could make no mistake, they still kept an iron grip on his wrists. Once one hand was free, they took a pair of cuffs off their belt and slapped it on his free hand.

“On your feet,” the petite thing muttered, jerking him out of his seat the moment his other hand was unbound. They roughly spun him around and cuffed his hands behind his back. “Let’s go, I have things to do,” they – she? There was some feminine-sounding nasality to the voice coming from under the helmet – ordered, pushing him towards the doors Lilith had just exited out, her white hair the only thing of much contrast in the dim hallways.

Alexander thought about fighting back when this creature began to uncuff him. Slam his elbow against her head, run towards the exit...

What exit? The very exit Lilith and her guard stepped through? There was no other way out. Perhaps trying to escape now wasn't the best idea.

By the time he realized this, he was hauled on his feet, his weak struggle--a flail of his free hand--barely noticeable as he was spun around and cuffed.

He cursed under his breath and hung his head, his hair sliding over his face. He knew he had made the right decision in not fighting here, but he still felt ashamed for not putting up more of a fight, like some pansy.

Alexander stumbled as he was shoved towards the door, all he could do to keep upright on his feet. His hands strained against the bindings. "Where are we going?" he asked, his voice full of contempt. What sort of things did these creatures do anyway? "Don't want to keep you from whatever vile shit you're into."

"Towards your own private palace. Keep moving," she ordered. Her voice was notably surly - there could be little doubt that he was not, in fact, going towards his own private palace. 'Vile shit', he called it. Under her helmet, Norea rolled her eyes. He spat it out like she was to do something criminal. "You are my responsibility for now, as the empress declared." He knew nothing.

By the time they got to the doors, Lilith was out of sight, having turned down one corridor, and the guard pulled Alexander towards the opposite end. The halls themselves of this place felt wrong. The walls were inlaid with mosaics of red and gold stones, spelling out a tale in some indecipherable, inhuman language, and though there were no windows or torches, anything to light their path, the halls were illuminated anyway. Other inhuman creatures would sometimes pass them by, nodding to Norea before being on their way, staring at Alexander until they had passed each other by.

A pair of wood-like doors finally arose near them, so sudden it was like they'd come from nowhere. A hulking guard was already stationed by the doors. When they recognized Norea, they opened the doors with a deep creak. It was… less of a torture chamber than one may have imagined, but there was almost nothing there. The most notable things were the long chains dangling from the wall, piled on the floor, and a small curved window a few feet off the ground – the first glimpse of the outside world he could get.

The hair on Alexander's arms and the back of his neck stood on end as he was guided down the hallway. The seemingly unnatural illumination of the hallway combined with the strange markings spooked him, yet his guard gave him no chance to take a closer look at the marks. The monstrous appearances of many of the people they passed by didn't help matters; he had yet to see a human like him.

Eventually, he was lead to a rather simple room. The chains from the wall were the first things that caught his eye, and his stomach lurched at the sight of them. So he was to be chained like a dog to what looked like a very drafty and uncomfortable room. He thought nothing yet of the window, except that it was too small for him to squeeze through, so he looked over his shoulder and craned his neck to assess the situation of the hallway behind the guard. He saw no sign of Lilith. His guard didn't seem all that big, strong, or imposing. Perhaps he could somehow make a break for freedom.

He turned to face his guard, waiting to see what she would do.

She didn't let him take in the sights (however limited they were) for long. The instant he turned to face her, Norea pushed him back around, towards the wall, towards the chains. "Get on the ground," she growled. If he was hoping for a window of escape, he was rapidly losing it. The hallway he was scoping out was closing off to him more and more. The doors they'd arrived through were beginning to close slowly, and the thunderous creaks echoed even louder in the small stone room than out in the corridors. Norea reached out to the floor and picked up the two chains snaking out from the walls. The ends of the chains were cuffed. Three guesses where those were going.

Alexander closed his eyes as panic spiked through him. It was now or never, but the mere thought of trying to escape this den of strange creatures almost kept his feet from moving. The rattle of the chains as his guard bent to pick them up broke through his terror like the tolling bells that promised an imprisoned life of misery should he stay and do nothing.

So, Alexander spun to the side and around the guard while she was still bent low and took off towards the closing door with as much speed as traction and leg power would allow. He barely managed to slip through the closing doorway. He darted to the right, in the direction Lilith had gone, hoping to not run into her but knowing that no exit existed at the other direction.

It was a shame for him, then, that directly to the left of the doors, was the guard who opened them. He only got a few feet before the hulking mound of flesh masquerading as a sentient being shoved him to the floor. The creature had him pinned down with just a foot - or, whatever one would call that appendage. The doors made that monstrous sound again, creaking open, and his captor stepped out, her steps echoing on the stones. She paused briefly, observing the situation. What a sad escape attempt. Desperate surface creatures would do that, though. They'd panic and not think things through. While he was pinned down, she knelt down beside him, grabbing his hair and pulling his head in her direction, intent on clearing up a few things between them.

"Perhaps you're not getting it yet," she growled. "Did you see how empty your room was? How nice and devoid of torture instruments it was?" This one was too dumb for inferring, it seemed. She'd have to be specific with him. "The more you try to escape and the more you misbehave, the more instruments of torture get moved into your room. Do you understand why you shouldn't do this again?" she asked, her voice dripping condescension.

Somehow, Alexander hadn't seen the hulking mass as he made his mad dash down the hall. He felt it first, slamming into the guard as though it was a brick wall. He collapsed on his back, the wind knocked out of him, and then curled his body instinctively against a heavy weight suddenly pressed upon his chest. He grunted and gasped for breath, punching and tugging at the "foot" pinning him down like a fallen tree trunk. Nothing he did made a scratch or so much as nudged the guard.

He cried out when his warden yanked on his hair, forcing him to look at her. Between the difficulty in breathing and the sharp pain, it was a wonder he caught any of her words at all, but the mention of torture devices suddenly had him very still. She had a point; there had been nothing imposing or frightening in his cell...except for the chains, the literal links to the end of his life. He knew that her words were meant to frighten him into submission--they were very effective indeed--but he had a feeling that meeting the torture devices one by one would be inevitable anyway. Would they brandish the pliers with a sneeze? Would they roll in the iron maiden upon a wrong look? This was Hell, after all.

Alexander closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. He assumed it pointless to submit, yet he also could not resist, stuck in limbo with his own fear. He waited for the pressure on his chest to subside, for the tugging pain on his scalp to cease, all the while fighting back the despair that threatened to move over him like a silent fog.