Love in a Game of Charades

The Sea of Fire and smoke writhes like two lovers in an endless dance of creation. Columns of smoke and scorching vortices conceal the horizon and confuse the senses so thoroughly that you lose all sense of space, and perhaps of time. The Dimension of the Eternal Flame was not made for mortals. Like the other elemental worlds, it is an ancient seedbed of reality: the cradle of fire beings, and above all, home to the greatest known city in the multiverse: Jahannam, the City of Brass. A metropolis that does not live. It groans under the whips of sadistic efreeti, fire djinn whose most powerful can bend reality itself… but never for free. History is lined with poorly worded wishes that became curses for the foolish.

One of those fools was your captain, Bouřevzdych. Were it not for his morbid obsession with resurrecting his unborn daughter and his dead wife, you would not now be standing on the deck of a slave steamer bound for the colossal slave market of the Nine Hells. Though… it could have been worse. You were lucky that no one has sold you into the World of the Damned. Yet.

They say even the innocent have a price in Hell. Especially when their souls can be forged into Infernal Coins: Sorrowmarks, Infernals, and Sufferance. The currency that fuels the entire bureaucratic, mechanical, and exploitative machinery of the Eternal Prison.

Your mind slowly surfaces from lethargy. From the dense pyroclastic smoke, saturated with iron and despair, the outlines of the efreeti corsairs' steamer emerge. You were captured on the basis of forged papers and unclear forms. No one ever quite understood where Bouřevzdych got his permit from the efreeti sultan. Was it a trick? An unlawful seizure? Perhaps. But today, it no longer matters.

Tumbling across the deck is the only member of your crew who has slipped the guards' control: Ruan Jehovich. Wrapped in his ceremonial burial shroud, with a small gravestone strapped to his back in case he becomes a martyr, he shouts into the distance: “Trade me for the captain, I'll make a better slave!” No one pays him any attention. Efreeti sadism finds his masochism utterly unrewarding, and rightly so. Whenever he might suffer for others, he enjoys it like a pilgrim in penitent ecstasy. The fire dwarf Mercedes hisses at him: “Help me out of these chains, corpse,” but in moments requiring heroism, Ruan does not excel. He sways across the ship like a compass needle during a magnetic surge. Instead of cutting the ropes, he cuts himself on one and topples overboard. By a stroke of luck in misfortune, he catches his own red cingulum (the sash-rope) while the flames of the sea lick at his feet. “Ooh, I was so close! To die in the enemy's arms while saving friends!” Mercedes assures him with disgust: “You just fell, idiot.”

Another endlessly brief moment passes. You find yourselves in a slave cage at the dockside edge of the Dirty Market. Among the traders are efreeti, devils, liches, and warlocks from across the multiverse. You hear the crack of whips, the moaning of souls. Despair seeps in like an oil stain. Many prisoners are so lost that their anxious thoughts have begun leaking from their mouths: “I didn't do anything wrong… an angel will save me… this can't be the end… please…”

From one cage, a beautiful woman watches you. Her eyes are full of something like madness, but her voice is steady and focused:

“They say that if a devil fell in love in the Seven Hells, every soul he owned would be set free. I'll remember you, stranger. Perhaps you're the last beautiful thing I'll ever remember.”

And with that, she is loaded onto a raft and carried toward the terrible maw of the Infernal gates, her eyes locked on yours until she vanishes into the smoke.

Every dark figure in the crowd goes rigid with hatred, as if trying to outstare a basilisk. You hear your captor spit and nearly retch: “By the stench of Jahannam, another soul inspection. Looks like the Smelters will have to run you through the Fire Peak away from these holy-headed sniffers.”

Maybe not everything is lost.

Ruan shrieks: “That is a sign! I will lay down my life for your freedom! Run!” But nobody moves.

What do you do?