With your fingers twisted together behind your back, you wait to see what that sort of ogre wants from you, yet without doubting that it is your head.

" What do you want ?" he asks, at your greatest surprise.

As you want to look like you are only here by chance, you babble something about a golem that you would have lost and whose search would have taken you here. Now, he seems to let himself be bluffed.

After all, you think that you were right not to interfere. This battle is not yours and nothing indicates that any of the duellists wants a helping hand.

Soon however, the fight begins to go in favour of the monster. And in a last surge of rage, he deals a blow with his mace, which literally sinks into the skull of the one who looked like a man until now. It was to be expected...
The winner picks up the sword left by his opponent ; then he looks in your direction. You have been spotted. He comes forward. But you do not even try to run away.

Obviously, you are good at dissimulation and opportune altering of initial plans.

" Come on ! Follow me. You got astray in this peasouper."

Without really understanding where the monster is taking you, you quietly follow in his footsteps, and, after a five minute walk, he gets you out of the layer of fog. He leads you into quite a big cavity that a large number of demons are crossing by multiple doors.

" Here you are at the crossroad of Torments. Good luck."

Then he rushes through one of the doors. Once again, you are lost... And not in front of a dead end or an alternative but before an infinity of potential choices, of uncertain futures. Your future is as indeterminate and hazardous as it was at the beginning.

A strong smell of dry blood irritates your nostrils. Right there, the corridor opens out like a cornice upon a breathtaking pit. Down below, a group of damned is fuelling the flame of a fire in which they all go in turn and burn to the bones. On their way out of the blaze, the skeletons continue with the same pace their walk in a circle.

Their flesh recomposes progressively and is nearly intact as they go past a great devil wearing blue tights and a large cape forming a hood on his head. With a gigantic iron spoon, he is stirring molten grease in a huge cast iron vat sat on a few embers.

Then, with big and muscular spoonfuls, he throws some of that oil on the poor souls.

He too is not unfamiliar to you. His chest shows a bat figure. Two ears top up his skull.

Your guide points at him his index finger fitted, like the other fingers, with a blade.

" That one is really savage. At times, he bleeds the damned with the help of that pole ending like a billhook to feed on them. During his lost hours he has a hobby: he gets up on the surface of the world to act the fighter against evil and serve justice."

What a strange perversion that this double life, you think. Being a torturer on one hand and compromising oneself into the service of Good on the other !

Soon you do not feel the pain in your calves anymore. You have been walking with your new mate for hours. But he is such good company that he makes you forget all about suffering.

" It is the same with the damned I'm in charge of, he confides. I constantly tell them jokes to cheer them up, I recite them sagas by episodes, holding them spellbound every time. So much so that in the end, they forget their torment."

He explains that there is nothing he can do about it; that is the way he is. The master of the place would probably not be delighted if he happened to know it.

Later on, you see a curious monster staring at you not far away. He has the apparent anatomy of a man, but not the stance. He actually stands on his four soles, skimming the floor. His body, suspended at the same distance from the ground at all times, is like the one of a spider, static in its every move.

He is the spider-man. He too plays the righter of wrongs on earth as a pastime. Yet, down here, he wraps the poor souls condemned to eternal wrath in cocoons and sucks their substance until they dry. In order to clear his path, your guide throws his cutting hands in the cobwebs.

" I must go back to my sheep. They are waiting for the continuation of the Nibelungen that I am currently recounting to them. I left them at the Undines' deadly prophecy in Hagen."

Straight away, a twisted imp leaps in front of you. He jumps up and down like a brat waiting for his ice cream. But, against all expectations, he also speaks :

" Sir, who are you going to fight with ? Leviathan, Ashtaroth or Typhon ? Our Mistress sent me to take you there now."

At last !