Out of the swamps at last, we climbed talus slopes of spiky, salty crystals and even staggered through a forest of dead trunks in a flurry of caustic snow. Yes, it snows in Hell. All that “until Hell freezes over” stuff is nonsense. It snows in Hell all the time. It just isn’t frozen water. I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it because it’s disgusting, but I traveled through quite a few snowstorms in Hell. Some of them were acid, some were flurries of frozen piss, some of the things that piled up in drifts as we staggered through the gusts weren’t even liquids. But all of them stung.

By the time we’d slept three or four more times, the empty spaces of the Asphodel Meadows began to resemble something a little closer to their name: dark, boggy moors covered with pale flowers. Fog crept in as we squelched across them, eventually obscuring the landscape almost completely. In the mist I could see shapes, many of them upright, but if they saw us they never let on. Instead they wandered among the asphodel stalks, plucking the gray blooms and stuffing them in their mouths as tears dribbled down their cheeks. Eventually, I managed to work out from Gob’s answers that everybody in Hell ate the asphodel flowers in some form, baked into bread or flat cakes (I’d had a few of these; they were bland, even bitter, but mostly unremarkable) but that those who ate the flowers raw experienced the sins of their lives over and over, like a bad acid trip. Worst of all, though, was that the more they consumed and the more they wallowed in their own terrible mistakes and cruelties, the more of it they wanted. The few asphodel-eaters I saw up close had staring eyes and twitching fingers, like Hieronymus Bosch crackheads.

It was hard to remember that, compared to many, these creatures were among Hell’s most fortunate, the few who’d managed to find a place of relative freedom for themselves somewhere between an eternity of slavery in the houses of the demon lords and an eternity in the torture pits.

Eternity? That still stuck in my craw. I knew that some of these people must have been the worst sort of folks when they were alive, murderers, rapists, child molesters. I honestly didn’t mind them getting even a few centuries of hellfire, but . . . forever? Even if the damned remembered who they were and what they’d done to get there (unlike me and my angelic friends at the Compasses) how meaningful could any punishment be after a million years? How many of these walking phantoms could even remember what they’d done? And what about the ones like Caz, who had been driven to their crimes by others? She’d killed her husband, sure, but if anyone had deserved to get stabbed into a bloody hash, that guy had.