Me – ‘I swear this place is like an Outer Outpost of Hell.’
Lucifer – ‘It’s hot here for a reason…’
Between the sounds of all the people who came here to drink themselves to death that wake you up at night as you slept in Purgatory, and the realization that everybody I trusted here tried to get me into the white slave trade, with the exception of those who themselves fled the city, I’ve had enough of this place for a lifetime.
You will never see me set foot on this land again.
It is a desert in a true and complete sense. A moral wasteland. A place where dreams turn to nightmares fast, where the only opportunity you find is the opportunity to come face to face with the Darkness that lies deep within, and that Darkness might very well destroy you.
I have previously written that people who move here should be forced to either choose life or be euthanized or banished from the city after three months here everybody is forced to make a choice. The angels mark them with a Sign of Life or a Mark of Death, and they laugh cynically. I’ve seen it. They smoke cigars to Californian 1960s garage rock, in their seat above Red Rock. I’ve seen it.
I came here with a subconscious death wish I came here to finalize my Pact of ten years which had no good way to be concluded other than me accepting defeat.
All I can say is I went far enough to earn my right to be freed from it and now all resulting things may be possible to unentangle.
Like Frodo and Bilbo when they tossed the One Ring into Mount Doom, I got so stuck I saw no way out of this. I’ve been asking myself for almost three months, ‘Is this the end? Is this how my life ends?’ Alone in a foreign land, struck by some dark forcefield that only leads to more dead ends.
But hey, they were rescued by eagles, in the end. The eagles came for me as well. I’ve never looked forward to being ferried away from a place by the iron eagles so much in my life!
