Who: Mammon & Greed What: Some are born to be kings. Others, were just born to be unlucky sons of b*tches. Where: Hell - Mammon's Domain. When: [Backlog] August 01 2011 Warnings: Possible language and all that Welcome Back to Hell jazz.
Hell.
There's really only one word to describe it and that word is - unoriginally - itself.
Forget about poetry, forget about similes and metaphors, the thousands of alliteration that the mortals have created from the beginning of time, through Paradise Lost, to nowadays when Hell just means being dragged to a theatre by your younger sister to watch some teenage-star actor cry like a bloody pansy over sparkly skin.
To be in it, is another matter entirely.
The fires may be overrated, but the pain is not. What you once could have and what you once had you can have but only if you give up what you can't give up first to have what you now can have but this is Hell, sweetheart, so you can't have it anyways.
To the embodiment of Need and Craving, to be in Hell and be on a literal leash, with what it wanted, what it needed before, laid out before it in shadowy illusions and then taken away, day after day - Hell was being home, with the house on fire and watching everything you had burned away, piece by piece, until they rose up in ashes again, reconstructing, into a stronger illusion, then burning down in a larger fire and reliving it again and again.
To the embodiment of Greed, this cycle should be tiring, should be familiar, and should be goddamn tolerable, because of everything it has been through.
And yet. To not be able to reach out and just once touch the bloody illusion and feel it for himself that it's not real, that reassurance, was driving him mad to the point where the chain on him had chaffed away a good chunk of the dead carcass of a mortal appearance that he once had topside, his limbs constantly stretching and wanting, the dead muscles ripped, no longer his, either. Nothing was his, down here. Nothing, but his maddening need.
A need that could not be fulfilled and yet, and yet was just enough to survive.
A dull pair of amber-hued cow eyes, staring mindlessly, hungrily at the hollow illusion before it, unknowingly also staring at the dark entrance just beyond it, beyond this, the Hell King Mammon's domain. And with each pull, each scrape of dead flesh against dead bone, something sharper flickering behind those eyes.