Chapter 173 --173
Elara stumbled as reality reformed around her. She was no longer standing in peaceful whiteness. She was standing on scorched earth, beneath a sky the color of old blood.
Heat slammed into her—oppressive, suffocating, wrong. The air tasted like copper and ash.
"Welcome," the voice said, now coming from directly beside her, "to one of the places where petty selfishness ends up."
Elara turned.
A woman stood there now—fully materialized for the first time. Tall, ageless, with features that seemed to shift between ethnicities and ages depending on how the light hit them. Her eyes were ancient. Her expression was... disappointed.
"What is this?" Elara asked, voice steady despite the wrongness of everything around her.
"Hell," the woman said simply. "One of many. The realm where souls are purified through suffering proportional to the suffering they caused."
She gestured ahead.
Elara looked.
The landscape was nightmare made manifest. Rivers of something that moved like water but burned like acid. Mountains of twisted metal and bone. And everywhere—*everywhere*—people.
Screaming.
Burning.