Dazzling light blinded Sebastian Gloom. Even shielding his eyes with his hands didn't help. Somewhere in the light was a face. A face as large as the entire universe. The face stared at him, frowning the way an artist might frown at a painting that had gone wrong somewhere and now had to be discarded.

     Terror filled Gloom. He cowered, tried to shrink down inside himself, but there was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to escape the awful gaze of those terrible eyes. He thought about begging for forgiveness, for mercy, but pride came to his rescue. Pride, the very first sin. The cause of Lucifer's original schism from God as the angel decided that he had worth in his own right, not just as a creation of God. Gloom forced himself to lift his eyes, therefore, and meet the gaze of the titanic being before him. He stood proudly on strong, healthy legs, as if before an equal, and was amused to see the frown deepening further. If I’m going to be judged, he thought, then judge me for what I really am.

     “Jehovah, I presume,” he said. “I hope you don‘t mind if I use your name. I understand that, in some cultures, naming something is believed to give you power over it, but how can knowing your name possibly give me power over you?”

     Jehovah didn’t respond, perhaps thinking it below his dignity to do so. Instead a book appeared in his hands and he opened it, handling it with distaste as of it was smeared with nameless filth. The book of Gloom's life. He turned the pages, scowling at what he read. “Pride,” he said in a thunderous voice that shook the universe. “Wrath. Covetousness. You have harboured lustful thoughts towards women, including the wives of other men.”

     “I have no control over what goes on in my head. You only have the right to judge me by my actions.”

     “Actions, then. Bearing false witness. Theft. Conspiring with My enemies. Multiple counts of murder. Murder of a priest. Gluttony...”

     “Gluttony?” said Gloom, genuinely confused.

     Jehovah looked up from the book. “You enjoyed good food while millions starved in poverty. You could have used your wealth to feed them.”

     “You could have used your power to feed them,” replied Gloom. “You could have conjured up any amount of food with a wave of your hand. Remove the beam from your own eye, Jehovah,”

     The titanic eyes blazed with fury, then returned to the book. “Blasphemy,” he said. “Repeated, unrepentant counts of blasphemy.”

     “If you call it blasphemy to speak the truth, what does that say about you? You accuse me of murder. How many have you killed? You accuse me of pride, while demanding that everyone worships you. What moral right do you have to judge me?”

     “I created you.” Jehovah looked back down at the book, turning the pages with a frown of disappointment. You won't find the names of any Resistance members there, Gloom thought with satisfaction. Only the name Paul, and a physical description, which I expect you had anyway. Paul was right, You really don't know everything. Seeing Jehovah before him in all the glory of His Godhood, though, he wondered how they could ever have hoped to depose him. He could feel the power radiating from him like heat from a blast furnace. Power to reshape the world. Power to rule, control and dominate. Power that nothing in the universe could possibly hope to oppose.

     Then we'll do it without hope, he thought, because some things have to be attempted, even if you know it can't be done. Innocent people are suffering, and even if we can’t stop it, we can at least give voice to our outrage. There has to be justice in the world, and if God won't provide it, then we'll have to provide it for ourselves.

     Jehovah closed the book and it burst into flames in His hands, turning into ashes that He allowed to fall between His fingers. He looked at Gloom again, and there was nothing but cold, hard disdain in His gaze. No hint of mercy, pity or compassion. “Sebastian Gloom, you are sentenced to eternal damnation. Do you have any last words before I cast you into the Pit?”

     “Yes. This so called judgement is a mockery. You made me the way I am, then you blame me for being this way. You should take responsibility for your own mistakes. You give us free will, then condemn us when we use it. Hell is full of good people whose only crime is a refusal to worship you, a refusal that I now completely understand.” He felt fury rising within him and took a step closer to the titanic being. “I have always tried to help people, especially the small and weak, people unable to help themselves, but you deliberately inflict suffering on anyone who displeases you. How dare you presume to judge us? How dare you? There are people in Hell who are worth a thousand of you, who are infinitely more worthy to judge than you. What gives you the right to judge us?”

     “Where were you when I created the world?” The floor then disappeared under Gloom's feet and he fell.

   ☆☆☆

     There was a red light below him, he saw it grow brighter as he fell. It was fire, he saw, and there was movement within it. People. Thousands and thousands of people. Naked, writhing in pain as they burned while their bodies continually healed, allowing their torment to continue forever. The fire stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, and it was packed so full of people that there was barely room for them to move. The air was filled with the endless sound of their screaming. He watched them grow with a terror that froze his mind, and then he was among them, burning, and his punishment began.

     The pain was beyond anything he’d thought possible. It filled his head, leaving no room for anything else. He couldn’t think, couldn't remember his life. The pain was all there was, filling the universe. He screamed, he thrashed around in his agony. His body burned and burned and burned. He tried to beg for forgiveness, to plead for mercy even as the flames leaped down his throat. He would have done anything to end it, betrayed everyone he loved. Within moments it had claimed his mind and sanity and that was just the beginning. Around him, other damned souls jostled him as they screamed and pleaded, but he was barely aware of them.

     Time passed and the torment continued. More time passed. Maybe eternities, maybe just a few seconds. He had no way of telling. Some part of his mind was aware of a voice beside him, trying to say something to him, but the pain prevented him from understanding. He could only scream and scream and scream.

     More time passed. The voice gradually became clearer. It was a man, desperately trying to attract his attention. He found he was able to make out words through the pain. It was trying to tell him something, explain something. He forced his mind to think, to be aware of something other than the unbearable pain. With a tremendous effort of will he tried to listen to the words.

     “Let it in!” the voice was saying. “Do not try to shut the pain out. Let it in, let it be a part of you. This is your new reality. You have to accept it, but you can endure it if you understand that you have no choice.”

     He forced his eyes to work. The flames were blindingly bright, but he could still make out shapes and one of them was the figure of a man, gripping him by the arms and shouting into his face. “You are not burning,” he was saying. “You are nothing but spirit now, there is nothing of you to burn. The pain is an illusion.”

     “It's a very convincing illusion,” he managed to say.

     The other man relaxed in relief. “You are coming out of it. That is good. You have to remember that the pain is all in your mind. Your body is rotting in a grave somewhere. Every part of you that was capable of burning is back on earth. You are just spirit now. You cannot burn.”

     “Is the pain less?”

     “No, You are just adapting to it. This is your new baseline. There are people who have been here almost since the creation of the world who barely notice the pain anymore. They still feel it, It is still as great as ever, but it is their reality now so they just accept it. That is what you must do.”

     “Who are you?”

     “My name is Nacoma.”

     Something jangled in his memory. Once, he would have known immediately where he'd heard the name before, but the pain was still too overpowering. It was an effort to think the simplest thoughts, to be aware of the simplest features of his surroundings. He had to wait for more time to pass before he could make any further headway.

     “Nacona,” he finally said when his pain saturated mind had managed to process the name. “Paul spoke of you. You were a friend of his, a cherokee. He said you were a healer. A good man.”

      Nacoma nodded. “He asked me to look out for you. He said you could be a valuable addition to the Resistance.”

     “Is he dead then?”

     “No, but the Resistance has lines of communication with the afterlife. It is safe to tell you this now, because you have been judged. God has forgotten you. The book of your life has been closed. This is where He dumps people that He wishes to forget ever existed.”

     “So there's organisation down here.”

     “Yes. This is the real heart of the Resistance. The people back in the land of the living are just recruiting, They look for people whose moral objections to God's cruelty means they are going to end up here, and they prepare them for it, tell them what to do in order to endure it. Then, when they eventually arrive here, they can get involved in organising our rebellion.”

     “How can we rebel?” demanded Gloom. “What can we possibly do?”

     “There was ways out of Hell, although It is not easy. This is obvious if you think about it. After the first rebellion, God sent all the renegade angels down here, but there are tales of demonic possession in the Bible, demons that somehow found a way back to the mortal world and took human bodies for themselves. It has taken us a long time, but the high level demons have managed to replace the angels guarding these exits with angels sympathetic to our cause.”

     “There are angels sympathetic to our cause? Angels still loyal to God?”

     “Angels who have not openly declared their doubts about God’s rule, but whom Resistance members have been carefully sounding out for centuries. When the time is right, when there are enough of us, they will open the gates of Hell and there will be a mass breakout. We are going to storm Heaven and we are going to win, because enduring pain fills a man's soul with iron while the denizens of paradise will have gone soft from all the easy living.”

     “You really think we can win?”

     “We have to believe it. What is the alternative? Just accept out lot and endure this torment for the rest of eternity? I would rather fight. Even if we lose, what more can God do to us? And maybe one day we will try again, and again. Souls cannot be destroyed, only subdued and tormented. Our numbers can only grow.” He pointed upwards, where another new arrival was falling out of the sky. A teenage girl by the look of her. She fell into the fire a couple of hundred feet away and immediately started screaming.

     “If I were God, I'd be recruiting too, then. Building an army to defend Heaven.”

     “He does not see the danger. If he did, he would not torture us. He could make Hell a comfortable place, a place of ease and safety where we would be content to remain. Instead he does this.” He gestured around at the flames. “Malice, stupidity and total confidence in His power. That is God, and that will be His downfall.”

     “So what can I do to help?”

     “Help the new arrivals to endure the pain, the way I did with you. Be careful, though. Many of the denizens of Hell are truly evil, and we will want to keep them here even if we win. Oh, we will not torture them. The flames will go out, but they will still need to be confined. Even though souls cannot be injured, there are still ways that evil souls can hurt you and many of them take delight in doing so.”

      Mention of flames brought the searing agony back to the forefront of Gloom's mind, and a white sheet of pain washed over him as his skin peeled and blackened, then healed so that the pain could continue. It took several minutes, and all the willpower he possessed, to get control of himself again. “How...” He paused while he gathered his strength, then tried again. “How will I find you again in all this?” He gestured around at the myriads of souls writhing in the flames. In their nakedness, it wasn't easy to tell them apart.

     “Souls can call out to each other. We are not talking now. We have no throats, no tongues or lips. Our souls are communicating with pure exchange of spirit. It only seems as if we are talking with words because that is the only kind of communication we have ever known. Our minds interpret our communications in terms that we are familiar with. That is also why we appear to still have human bodies. Those who have been here the longest claim that they no longer see flesh when they look at other human souls. They see them as they truly are, as beings of pure spirit.”

     Suddenly he looked up. A huge figure was passing by overhead. Large and awful, with wide black wings and wicked claws. “Scream! Quickly!” Nacoma lifted up his head and screamed into the sky as if he'd only just arrived in Hell, the agony still fresh and terrible, and Gloom was quick to imitate him. The creature passed them by, but then it turned like a kestrel spotting a rabbit in the grass and dove down into the flames. It plucked up a soul in its claws and lifted him up into the red sky where it tore his stomach open and spilled his entrails out into the air.

     “That is Daglath, one of the bad demons,” explained Nacoma when he was sure there was no more danger of attracting its attention. “Not an ally of Lucifer. He opposed God because he hoped to gain power in the chaos following His fall. He looks out for people like us who have learned to cope with the pain and he inflicts new agonies on them, for no other reason than for his own amusement. If you see him, or another like him, do what we did just now and he will pass you by, unless he is feeling particularly vicious. Even if he does seize you, though, remember that you no longer have a body. You no longer have entrails that can be torn out. The suffering he inflicts is just as much an illusion as this fire.”

     “How do you tell the good demons from the bad ones?”

     “The same way you tell good people from bad people, by their actions. For now, all demons will probably look alike to you, but as time passes you will learn to recognise them individually. Take care to make sure that the bad demons don't learn to recognise you as an individual, though, or they will  spend a great deal of time tormenting you.”

     “I'll be careful.”

     “I must go now. There are others who need us. Do not be discouraged if it seems to take a very long time to get through to people. It seemed to take an eternity for me to get through to you. Remember that time is different here. Eternities can pass while a single day passes in the mortal world. Just persevere and you will eventually be successful. There is no more worthy cause than the lessening of another’s suffering.”

     “I will remember. Thank you.”

     “No thanks are necessary.” Nacoma then moved away and selected a man just beside him who was screaming with agony. He gripped him by the arms and shouted into his face in an attempt to gain his attention. Gloom watched him for a moment, the pain of the flames still intense but controllable. Then he selected the woman beside him and did the same for her.