Lord of the Seven Hells

Arista sat across from Beelzebub during one of their usual tea visits, turning her cup slowly between her hands while a question she'd somehow never asked finally surfaced.

"...Can I ask you something? I've been calling you Lord of the Seven Hells this entire time, and I don't think I've ever asked what that means."

Beelzebub set down his teacup with visible satisfaction. "You're curious about my title. Finally. I was beginning to think you never would be."

"Is it a moral thing? Seven layers for different sins, punishment, eternal suffering, that sort of thing?"

"Goodness, no. I don't punish anyone, Strawberry. The title is structural, not moral." He gestured vaguely downward. "There are seven layers in this realm, each smaller than the one above it. Layer One is the largest and safest, which is why every major settlement sits here. The lower layers become progressively less hospitable, until you reach Layer Seven, which is only about ten kilometers across and contains exactly one resident."

"...One?"

"An Ifrit."

That made her pause, but Beelzebub continued before she could ask anything further. "The descent points do not sit directly beneath one another. Each passage is offset from the one above it, so reaching the bottom means crossing every layer in turn. No one simply digs a straight shaft from Layer One to Layer Seven."

"...Wait. I dug down with a bicycle boring rig when I first reached the Demon Realm. Never found another layer."

"Because you were nowhere near the entrance to Layer Two. You were fortunate."

"Or unlucky, depending on how much I wanted to find something weird."

"That is exactly the sort of sentence that makes me regret explaining things to you."

Arista grinned, then another thought occurred to her. "Now every demon has the pickaxe recipe. Doesn't that make this a problem?"

Beelzebub shook his head. "A pickaxe makes excavation possible. It does not make demons patient. Digging hundreds of meters through stone with no guarantee of finding anything discourages most of them well enough on its own."

"As long as nobody builds another bicycle boring rig."

He stared at her over his cup, saying nothing.

"...Right. Sorry."

"You do not sound sorry."

"I'm not."

She let the silence sit a moment before circling back to what actually bothered her. "So have you met the Ifrit? In person?"

Beelzebub's theatrical ease dropped several degrees. "Once. We reached an understanding. I do not visit him, and he does not leave Layer Seven."

"...Should I be worried about him?"

"No. He has shown no interest in anything above his own layer, and the structure has contained him longer than anyone remembers. He is dangerous. He is not restless."

Arista glanced down at the floor, suddenly aware of how much world sat beneath everything she'd built. "Given how much I've stumbled into by accident since I started playing, I feel like I should apologize in advance if I ever end up down there."

Beelzebub's expression changed at once. "...Please don't."

She blinked.

"I would like to keep you around, Strawberry. Preferably nowhere near an Ifrit."

"No promises."

"Strawberry."

"I'm kidding. Mostly."

Beelzebub closed his eyes. "That word has never once comforted me."

Three weeks later, Claire frowned at her instrument readout for the third time that morning and checked the calibration before finally calling Arista over.

"...The lava network is running cooler."

Arista looked at the figures. "How much?"

"About four degrees below baseline. Consistent across every monitoring point I've checked. That's not enough to break anything, but a stable system doesn't lose four degrees for no reason."

Arista studied the numbers, and a conversation over tea surfaced from somewhere in the back of her mind. "...We should talk to Beelz."

They found him that afternoon, and his composure faltered the moment Claire laid out the readings.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Across the entire network?"

"Every point I can monitor," Claire said. "Different channels, different locations. The drop is uniform."

Beelzebub studied the numbers for several seconds before speaking. "There is only one thing I know of that could affect the ambient temperature of the entire structure at once."

"What?" Claire asked.

He sighed. "Frank."

Arista blinked. "...Who?"

"Frank?" Claire glanced between them.

Beelzebub pinched the bridge of his nose. "The Ifrit."

"You named an ancient fire elemental Frank," Arista said, flat.

"He declined to introduce himself when we first met. I needed something to call him."

"Frank."

"It seemed pleasantly unassuming."

Claire held up the readout, unwilling to let the tangent derail her point. "If Frank is the source maintaining the ambient heat, we need to see what's happening down there."

Beelzebub clearly agreed, though he looked deeply unhappy about it. Rather than leading them toward any known descent route, he took them through a narrow door behind one of his receiving rooms and into a bare chamber marked only by a circular pattern cut into the stone floor.

"...This is how we're getting there?" Arista asked, glancing around the empty space.

"Unless you would prefer several days of walking."

He stepped into the center of the circle. The carved lines ignited beneath his feet, orange fire racing outward through the pattern before a rising buzz filled the room. Flies poured from his coat in a dense black swarm, spiraling around all three of them until Arista lost sight of the walls, the floor, and Claire standing beside her.

Then the swarm broke apart.

Dark volcanic stone stretched around them beneath a ceiling glowing faintly red overhead.

"...Where are we?"

"The Seventh Layer."

"...How?"

Beelzebub adjusted one cuff. "Perk of being ruler of Hell."

"Can anybody else teleport?"

He considered that. "Not that I know of. Michael may possess something similar within his own realm, though we've never been close enough that he confided such a thing to me."

"So this is a ruler thing."

"A ruler-of-Hell thing."

"Good," Arista said. "I built five and a half thousand kilometers of metro. I was about to be very annoyed."

Claire snorted, checking her instrument again. "Still cooler here too."

They followed Beelzebub toward a deep red glow farther into the chamber, and Frank quickly became impossible to mistake for anything else. The Ifrit occupied a broad section of the cavern floor, enormous coils of blackened, ember-cracked material shifting slowly around a core of orange heat.

"...'One resident' undersold him," Arista said, stopping beside Beelzebub.

Frank's eyes opened, settling first on Beelzebub, then on the two women beside him. Before anyone could speak, he inhaled sharply and sneezed. The blast of heat turned a nearby ridge of stone orange.

Beelzebub stared at him. "Frank. You are unwell."

"I do not become unwell." He paused, visibly fighting another sneeze. "I have never become unwell."

"And yet."

Claire, apparently deciding an ancient fire elemental was simply another malfunctioning system, stepped forward. "Has anything changed recently? Anything at all, even if it seems unrelated?"

Frank considered the question. "Lava from the upper layer has been removed more often than it once was. It returns later, diminished."

"Diminished how?"

"Cooler."

Arista went very still. "...The metro."

Claire looked at her.

"Twelve trains," Arista said slowly. "Four running the diagonals, eight circulating the outer ring. Every one fills a lava basin before departure, uses that heat along the route, then dumps the cooler lava back into the network afterward."

Claire's expression shifted as the pieces settled into place. "And when did the heat start leaving the system faster than it was returning?"

Frank thought for a moment. "Approximately half a year ago."

"That's when we added the last two trains," Claire said, looking at Arista.

Arista rubbed a hand over her face. "So the old ten-train schedule stayed under the recovery rate. Adding the last two pushed us over it."

"That appears to be the threshold," Frank said.

Claire nodded, already working through the fix. "Then we don't remove two trains. We reduce the total service load to what ten trains running full schedules would produce. Stagger departures, lengthen the intervals, make sure the same pools aren't tapped repeatedly."

"So we can't use lava heat for steam engines anymore?" Arista asked, glancing toward Frank.

He shook his head. "No. At small scale, the system compensates. Heat taken from lava that stays within its channel is restored naturally. The problem begins when enough lava is repeatedly removed, used elsewhere, and returned cooler than it left."

Claire looked back at her notes. "So heating water over a lava pool is fine. Carrying the lava away, extracting the heat somewhere else, and dumping it back cooler is what pushed the system past its recovery rate."

"Correct."

Arista winced. "We've been slowly refrigerating Hell with public transport."

"I do not suffer from refrigeration." He sneezed again.

Claire raised an eyebrow, and Frank relented.

"The terminology is imprecise," he allowed.

"We'll reschedule the network," Claire said. "Twelve trains, lower frequency, same total service load as ten. That should bring the system back into balance."

Frank's glow shifted faintly. "That would be acceptable."

"I'm sorry," Arista said. "We didn't know the metro was affecting you. We'll fix it."

Frank studied her for a moment. "You did not know."

Beelzebub's expression softened. "Perhaps some soup would help."

"I do not eat soup."

"I was attempting to be comforting, Frank."

Arista glanced down at her inventory and brightened. "What about charcoal?"

"Strawberry," Beelzebub said, turning toward her.

"What? He's made of fire. He's running low. Charcoal is fuel. That's basically chicken soup, if the patient happens to be a furnace."

Frank stared at the small bag of briquettes she produced. "This is the first sensible offer of food I have received." His eyes shifted toward Beelzebub.

"The soup was a gesture," Beelzebub said, offended.

"You offered liquid to a fire elemental."

Arista bit back a laugh. "...Do you want some?"

Frank considered that with surprising seriousness. "It is not an unwelcome offer."

She tossed him the bag. The briquettes ignited before they reached him, vanishing in a bright flare that ran through his coils and strengthened the glow beneath the surface.

Claire checked the readout at once. "His output just went up."

Frank looked down at himself. "Oh."

Arista grinned. "Ancient fire elemental chicken soup."

"You have treated a primordial entity with barbecue fuel," Beelzebub said.

"I contain multitudes."

She reached for another bag. "Want more, Frank?"

This time he barely hesitated. "...Yes. I believe I would."

By the time they returned to Beelzebub's private chamber, Claire already knew what needed to change in the metro schedule, while Arista had emptied her entire charcoal supply.

Beelzebub glanced at her inventory window. "You are going to bring him more."

"Probably."

"Of course you are."

"He liked it."

Beelzebub sighed, though the beginning of a smile lingered behind it. "He did."