Alone With a Fiend and the Sulphur
by scar3crow
A tangible stench wafts up from the crevice before you, sulfur and flesh were never the most amicable of ingredients for even a fiends fragrance. But gravity doesnt lie, and your eyes are tempted to agree, that hind-legged bastard just misjudged the distance, and jumped too soon. Of course it might have made it had I not buried a handful of nails into its belly while it was still mid-air, and despite that, it managed to grab a hold of the ledge with its claws, though they lacked much gripping capabilities, especially after I applied my shotgun at a more personal range to the situation.

You had never seen a fiend do such a thing before, sure they werent bright, an animal, especially one as brutish as that, is a good judge of its surroundings, and is more prone to failure from some mechanism then the natural environment... musta been an off day for him.

You take a careful step forward onto the soot laden tile, fragmented in so many ways, resting upon an insecure pillar, as you begin to cross the volcanic-ravaged bridge over one of this worlds bizarrely ubiquitous lava flows. You would think lava would be a welcome respite in a world without sunlight, just some strange rebounding illumintation under those thick animated skies, but its heat seems self-contained. If you stood five feet away, it would be just a source of light, and potential death, and never certainly anything as potentially comforting as heat.

The bridge was shattered, and considering its construction of stone, scattered, but you traverse it fairly nimbly, yet all to wary of that stoic death waiting below. You're not even sure why you try so hard to not fall... It is only death after all, and youre not going anywhere. You thought after the grisly destruction of the hell mother, through an awfully literal inflammation of the heart, that you would be returning home.... That after your encounter with the grotesque Armagon, a refuge of Earth would be granted, or perhaps even after that epic discussion of flaming projectiles with a winged dragon, completing your trinity of monstrous devastations, you would leave this place.

Yet nothing. You still lay vulnerable in this twilight, which is understandable, what kind of creature would build a form for itself that rewarded its slayer with a free ride? But still you held out hope, that perhaps with their deaths it would send shockwaves throughout this faux-multiverse that desired to mirror your phobias, destroying its inhabitants and paving a way of escape. That perhaps with the relinquishment of organisation in their forces, Earth could repel them, and re-enter the slipgates, seeking out the remains of their exploratory team, of which remained, only you.

These thoughts occured countless times, happening in a flash of a second, synchronized with each footstep upon the granite. Depression and constant inquisition was wearing you down faster then any horde of the goatwhore's young. Suicide had occured before, and seemed almost rational considering, yet it was pushed back as an option, yielding privilege to your disdain for all of her voracious children, so rife with their cravings for flesh, and the abject misery of another.

For Quake is still alive, its existence permeates this world, and seems to drive and personally inflame and agitate the hatred in every vile being it commands, using their volatile nature for an awkward complacency towards one another, all for its goal of breaking another world, subjugating it like a crippled prostitute for Quake to execute his fetishes of smouldering ruin.

Your suicide would please Quake, it would be the perfect plot twist to his ruinous environments that you so precariously explore, and would capitalize well upon your hate for Quake. How perfectly ironic that your hatred for hatred, leads to your destruction by its employer. And so with each battle, your hate grows stronger, the desperation imbeds itself all the deeper, and the infested wound that is the conscious life flow of Quake in the very veins of this cursed horizon, festers in the corner of your eye, and the back of your mind, as you squint through that despicable lust for pain, to squeeze the trigger once more.