the stinging taste of bile is still present in the depths of my throat. i push up off the floor with vomit-soaked hands, needing to get away from the pungent smell around me. as the steam rises from the earth's rude crusting, i feel another wave of nausea overtake me. my body spasms violently, my head jerking forward as another torrent of deseased viscosity exits via my gaping mouth. weakened, my arms give under me and i fall forward to the ground with a soft splash. i spit out some remaining morsels, looking around me, the landscape shuddering violently once again. my sight blurs, i can barely make out the flaming caverns in which i am enclosed. winged things, borne high by hot winds from below, sometimes come within vision, but their shapes are so amorphous it is impossible to determine any particular form. my back and limbs still ache from weeks - if time has any meaning - of lashings made by indeterminate beings that crawl out of the fiery darkness to torment me in my sleep. i say sleep, but it is not the sleep that i once knew, rather vivid nightmares of such terror and movement that i always wake violently, the images still clear in my mind as if performed right before me. i wish i am dead every waking moment. but such hopes mean nought here, i know that i cannot die, and this truth makes it worse, for they would have it no other way. suddenly the plateau i am on tips and i slide backwards, slowly but surely, my clawing hands finding no purchase on the flat rock. at once i am flailing in the air, falling wildly, screams unheard, the heat rapidly becoming unbearable below me. i steal a glance upward in my descent, seeing what i have seen many times before, the chilling vortex of nothingness from which leap flames and shrieking spirits, and soon even that disappears as the searing flames of hell once again engulf my soul.