Visions of Dante

Visions of the Inferno blaze within my mind.  The tortured and the damned visions in the sulfuric mist of the hell fires moving like a thick and acrid wind across the walls and flowing lava. I move silently among them careful not to disturb their insanity and suffering lest they turn on my and I am forced to flee. 

These evil tortured souls are not what I have come for.  I am here to search.  A search that I am not sure will be successful in this pit of despair.  Its like an endless maze of corridors and open valleys of screaming souls begging for the release of a merciful death that will never come.  I can feel every one of them.  A vibration of despair that unsettles the soul deep in the recesses of the mind and body.  There is no comparison.  There are no adequate words that can describe a feeling that is so overwhelming, so utterly soul crushing.  It penetrates even me.  But  I am not here for them and their wales although unsettling have little effect on me.  I was simply the Boatman who brought them to these shores.  Their deeds in life paid the tole their unclean souls pulling them like an unending and drumbeat drawing them in.  They cannot stop or help themselves.  They have set their place, their torture is their own.  No demons or devil exist here.  These souls are their own tormentors, their own jailers.  They have settled themselves here.  The universal constant must be paid, the balance must be kept.  All pay for their sins in one way or another.  You tally those sins in life yourself.  You condemn yourself and you deliver yourself to these shores with my boat being the final travel fare that must be paid.

I walk silently but quickly gliding easily but carefully across the pumice in the burning valleys, through the cracked stone corridors where the chill is so deep that frost has permanently settled on the floors and walls where many of the condemned wander aimlessly, desperate to find an escape that can never be discovered. I know the way, the doors are open to me and there is no mystery in these dark corridors capable of ensnaring me.  I make my way to a lone door sitting at the end of a maze.  This is a room unlike any other.  On the other side of this door is a man.  A man I have come to know well over the years.  A doppelganger of mine you might say.  A living conduit of my essence.  He has fallen.  Given up.  He has lead himself astray from the very things that made him who he was and in his desperation for the end to his suffering he destroyed himself and those he loved so dearly, but I am here, I will bring him from this place and back to the land of the living.