The conversation was cut short as a massive figure appeared on the horizon and sped through the air in their direction. It was a demon, massive, dark and terrible, or did it only look that way because that was how they expected it to look? For centuries, popular culture had depicted fallen angels as evil creatures, terrifying to look at, but Gloom now suspected that the church was largely responsible for this. Propaganda. The church literally demonizing the enemies of their God. Gloom knew that many demons were indeed evil and terrible, but he was now becoming more and more certain that many, perhaps most, of the demons in Hell were good, moral creatures who had been damned for speaking out against God's injustices.

     As the demon loomed large above them, therefore, Gloom tried to ignore what his culturally programmed preconceptions were telling him and see the creature as it truly was. He closed his eyes, aware that everything he was seeing (and hearing, and feeling) was an illusion. The eldest damned souls claimed to be able to ‘perceive' other souls directly, to see the spirit world as it truly was. Sight, hearing and the other senses of the living human body were only relics of the past and had to be discarded. They only showed them what God wanted them to see and God wanted them to suffer. He closed his eyes, therefore, and searched within himself for another sense of which he'd previously been unaware. He concentrated...

     He knew he was trying to do what the elder souls had taken thousands of years to accomplish, but he had the advantage of knowing that it was possible. It wasn't something that could be taught, since there were no words to describe it. Words could only be used to describe something that two people already understood. You couldn't describe the colour red, for instance. You could only take someone to something that was red and say “There, that’s what red is.” Gloom was facing the same problem as he struggled to access his sense of spiritual perception. He had no real idea what he was trying to do. He only knew that something was possible. He had no idea what, or how.

     His efforts were interrupted as the demon spoke, though. A great, booming voice that rolled out across the red hot, flaming landscape like rolling thunder following a titanic flash of lightning. “Attend me, all ye damned souls! Attend to my words.”

     “What's going on?” said Benson in alarm.

     “It’s Sammael, I’m sure of it,” replied Gloom. “The same demon that’s been teaching us how to fight.”

     “What does he...”

     Benson was cut off in mid sentence as the demon spoke again. “The second rebellion is at hand. All must attack their assigned targets All those within the sound of my voice are commanded to attack Netzach the Sublime. Prince of Eternity. Keeper of the Mournful Countenance...”

     He was interrupted by shouts coming from the damned souls below. “Who are you to command us? I am a king, I follow no man's commands.” Other shouts supported him, Gloom heard someone saying “I am loyal still, Your Majesty! I follow you even beyond death!” Others voiced their own refusal to follow the commands of a demon, some of them insisting that they were still loyal to God, but a far greater number of voices shouted them down. “We have to act together!” someone said. “Our one chance of victory lies in our unity.”

     The demon had his own answer to the protests, though. “If we are victorious,” his voice boomed out, “any who chose not to fight alongside us will remain in Hell after the rest of us have left. The spoils of war will not be shared with those who have not earned them.”

     That silenced the crowd, and the demon waited until the last angry mutters had died down before continuing. “I cannot defeat Netzach by myself, for he far surpasses me in power. I shall lead you to him, though, and grapple with him. I will drag him down to the ground so that you can engage him in your massed millions. You must subdue him as I have taught you to do. If you fail to do this, he will simply tear me apart and return to the skies, and although my body will heal, it will not be soon enough to help in the war. He will go to assist other angels being engaged elsewhere, and that may be enough to secure our defeat.”

     He looked down at the massed ranks of the damned below him. “If we are victorious, we will share in the bliss of Heaven, and those undeserving of paradise will be cast out. Judgement will be fair, according to the character of each soul. That is what we will be fighting for. That is what I have sought to achieve since the sun first rose on Earth. That is the crime for which I was damned. I still believe it is a cause worth fighting for, and I intend to fight for it until the end of eternity if necessary. Are you with me?”

     A great cheer went up from the thousands of damned souls gathered below, but Gloom found himself troubled by doubts. All his life, since earliest childhood, he'd been taught that demons were  evil, that the devil only wanted to lead people to misery and pain. Now they were presenting themselves as champions of liberty and justice. Most of them, anyway. Gloom looked around and saw that quite a few of the other damned souls around him were having similar doubts. Could this all be some kind of trick? Lucifer just using them to overthrow God for his own personal gain? What if they helped Lucifer become Lord of Creation and he turned out to be a worse tyrant than God ever was?

     Then he remembered where he was. He was in Hell, and most of the people surrounding him did not deserve the torment that had awaited them upon their first arrival. People whose only crime had been the breaking of some arbitrary religious law. He could believe that those who murdered or raped or abused children deserved to suffer, but what about people of other religions, whose only crime had been to have absorbed the beliefs of their parents, something over which they had had no choice?

     A case could be made for adulterers maybe, he thought, but what about sodomites? A crime that, as far as Gloom was concerned, affected nobody but the people committing the act themselves? And the bible spoke of God’s wrath falling upon the children and grandchildren of these people, people who might be completely innocent of any crime. When you looked at the kind of people who went to Hell, it was almost as though the Lucifer portrayed by the church was already in charge. How could things be worse than they are right now? Gloom mused. We have to try something, and this is the only thing we can do.

     “Be prepared!” cried Sammael, spreading his black wings to their fullest extent as he loomed above them like a bat above a broken ants nest. “The call will come very soon now. Be prepared for battle.” Another cheer went up, and the demon soared away into the distance as a massive hubbub of conversation rose from the damned souls, everyone talking among themselves about what was to come.

     “Can we actually do it?” asked Nacoma, glancing back and forth between the other two men. “Can we actually overthrow God?”

     “If we fail, how will we be worse off than we are now?” replied Benson. He gestured at the flames that still surrounded them, constantly burning their flesh. “This is God doing the very worst he possibly can to us. Remember how we screamed when we first arrived?” They all cringed uncomfortably. “If there were something worse that He could do to us, He would be doing it. That's the problem with infinite sadism. It leaves you with nowhere else to go when it fails.”

     “Are we absolutely sure that this is the worse He can do to us?” said Nacoma though. “Maybe the fire is nothing compared to some even greater torment that He has held in reserve so far.”

     “It doesn't matter,” said Gloom though. “Not if the torment lasts for all eternity. Even if He does have something worse in store for us, if it lasts for eternity then it will eventually cease to hold any power over us, just as the flames did.” He felt a little guilty saying this, because God did indeed have a greater torment waiting for them, and it was something that would not lose its hold over them as eternity ticked away. The ultimate torment of boredom would only get worse as time passed endlessly. It would happen no matter who was in charge of the universe, though. Toppling God or leaving Him in charge would make no difference. All Gloom could do was spare his friends for as long as possible by keeping his fears to himself.

     Benson chuckled. “This is the kind of war I like. A war in which nobody, neither us nor them, can be killed, or even permanently hurt. Which will benefit us immeasurably if we win but will cost us absolutely nothing if we lose. If the kind of God the church preaches about really existed, all wars would be like this.”

    “There is one thing that bothers me, though,” said Nacoma. “I have heard much about this Christ your people worship. What will happen if we come face to face with him on the battlefield? What if he tells us to meekly return to Hell and cease our rebellion? Even the damned, feeling some kind of residual reverence, might balk before opposing him. The war might come to an end there and then with us ending up right back where we started.”

     “Then we have to tell people the truth about him,” replied Gloom. “That he had wonderful powers to heal people and used them cynically as the means to recruit people into the worship of God. When I was a child, my religious education teacher told us a story about Christ healing a man with leprosy. She said that, so great was his power that he could have healed every leper in the world just by raising his hands. So why didn't he? I asked her. Why didn't he heal all the lepers in the world? She scolded me for asking a stupid question. A question she didn't like the answer to, she meant.”

     “All the lepers in the world suddenly getting better all at once might have been taken as a natural event,” agreed Benson. “It wouldn’t have been attributable to him, or to God.”

     Gloom nodded. “Every healing in the Bible was hands on, face to face, so that the patient knew exactly who it was whose power had healed them. To him, the power to heal people was nothing more than a tool, a means to an end. I despise him for it. If I had the power of Christ, I would just heal everyone and I wouldn’t care if anyone knew it was me or not.”

     “The problem may be all his words about loving your neighbour,” said Nacoma.

     Gloom laughed. “Do as I say, not as I do. The message was a good one, but for it to come from God, who created Hell as a place of everlasting torture...  Christians believe that everyone should be loved, and that sinners should be tortured forever. They believe both things at the same time!" He chuckled again. “I will never understand them.”

     “The problem is not Christians. It is Christ himself. How can we fight someone who preaches love and non violence?”

     “Christ apparently has no problem with this place. When he died on the cross, it’s said that he came down here and rescued all the righteous who had ended up down here through what I can only imagine to have been some kind of monumental bureaucratic blunder. He left everyone else behind, though. All the people who were not considered ‘righteous' because, I assume, they were the wrong religion. What choice do people have about what religion they're born into? If you're born in a country where everyone worships Baal, you're going to worship him too. That doesn't make you a bad person. Those people were abandoned here because of an accident of birth. If I find myself face to face with Christ, I'll have no problem punching him in the face.”

     “Many others may not feel the same way, though,” warned the Cherokee, “and that may be a problem for us. Also, he is said to have been given authority over all demons and damned souls. Suppose we find that we're physically incapable of opposing him?”

     “Given authority by God,” said Gloom. “It follows, therefore, that if we can defeat God, we can defeat Christ. Besides, as Benson just pointed out, what have we got to lose? The worst is that we end up back here.”

     “We'll know soon enough,” said Benson, looking up. The demons were back and were taking their places above their designated troops. “Looks like things are about to kick off.”